Techno, ambient, trance, dub, jungle, etc. are entire genres which follow completely different laws from the rest of music and offer unique rewards for the listener.

However, like any other type of music, there is a great deal of crud out there. Bad Techno loses sight of theme, melody, harmony, or original sounds and degenerates into a pathetically dull thumping. In fact, your average techno CD or compilation is likely to contain a majority of time spent on really boring boom-tss-boom-tss.

I like to think of techno falling into 3 grades:

It immediately becomes necessary to condense techno into compilations and mixes in order to weed out the crud. However, grading is subjective and you've only got two options:

1. Buy a CD compilation, which you rarely get a chance to hear before purchasing, and which is typically stuffed with tracks that record companies are trying to promote, which tend to be crud.
2. Buy a DJ mix tape. Only available in a few places, but if you know a DJ with your tastes in techno, a reasonable purchase. However, there's still a lot of guesswork involved and it's usually a tape, not a CD.

Even if you borrow a whole bunch of CDs from a friend, or take the expensive route and buy a whole mess of CDs yourself, you're stuck with typically only a few really good minutes on each CD.

Faced with this situation, i had an idea... why isn't there a program to let you:

1. Scan through a CD letting you indicate the parts you actually enjoy listening to,
2. Automatically match beats and fade/mix those segments together,
3. Write the output onto a CD-R (really cheap nowadays)

Presto, you've converted that pile of borrowed or expensive CDs full of crud into a beautiful, grade-A techno jewel.

I've looked at several software packages, but haven't found a good solution yet.  If you know of anything, let me know!

	PCDJ ($200 for full version, lite version free with annoying ads)
	Mixman StudioPro ($90) "enables anyone to create and play CD quality music - real-time control of tempo, volume, pitch and panning, thousands of royalty-free loops and samples, import your own .wav files, export your mix as a CD quality digital audio file."  Emphasis is on creating, not editing existing music. It can output to MP3, but it can't mix MP3 streams.

General audio editing:

Cool Edit Pro from Syntrillium Software.   "64-track digital audio, editing, and mixing.  Lots of top-quality digital effects modules. Edit files up to 2 gigabytes in size."  Unfortunately it's very slow and laborious to cut and mix the audio sections you want.