really stupid music mixing question →[More:]
since I can't ask this on AskMeFi during work hours...

Please have patience with me O great Knowers Of All Things Mixing via Macintosh. I am but a worthless n00b.

I have a Macbook Pro. I have GarageBand. I have an assload of digital music. I have also had a request to put together a 'good mix of stuff' for the Denver Cruise. What they do is hook someone's iPod (in this case it would be my 2nd gen Shuffle) up to a portable boombox.

Herein lies the problem. I have a ton of great stuff in iTunes, but when I load it onto my shuffle, I get mad volume variations, big gaps between tracks, and there are some songs (techno, usually) that I'd like to use that weren't ripped 'cleanly'; i.e. there's several-to-many seconds of useless drivel or dead air on the intro/outro of each track that I'd like to edit off wherever necessary.

So, with my existing technology, how easy would it be to:

- normalise the volume so that one track isn't OBNOXIOUSLY LOUD and the next one isn't really really quiet.
- trim / edit the 'margins' of songs to get rid of some of the intro/outro clutter
- seamlessly run from track to track without large gaps of silence, or even do some kind of nice crossfade action.

Note: that last is not as important as the other 2, as likely doing crossfade stuff would probably (?) mean mixing the whole 2+ hour long track into one long, continual .mp3 file... right? I'd rather not do that for the simple expedient of having to hit 'pause' and re-start the system at every bar stop. T'would suck to start the mix over each time we head somewhere else.

Um. Please tell me I'm not looking at like, eight hundred dollars worth of studio software? This seems like such a simple task to be able to accomplish, but I opened GarageBand and sorta played with it last night, then I googled around for some tips, most of which were written in jargonspeak, and now I'm even dumber than when I started.

Use small words, please.