adding a few seconds at the beginning of a song

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to use another program to create a several-second silent track, then insert that in the playlist. I use SoundStudio (free download at that link).

If you don't want to use another program, find a track in your library with several seconds of silence (like the space before a "hidden track"), set the start/stop times to play as much silence as you like, then duplicate it to get a silence-only track.

Hmm...you should be able to do this entirely within iTunes, without dragging and dropping anything.

1) Select a song (in iTunes) with a long-enough period of silence.
2) Set its start and stop times to be within that silent period, by using "Get Info > Options".
3) Convert the song to a new MP3 or AAC, using "Advanced > Convert Selection To..."
4) You should now have a new track with the same name that's only a few seconds long. (If you don't see it, try sorting on the "Date Added" column to bring it to the top.)
5) Rename the track to something like "Silence, 3 seconds".

Use the freeware Audacity to produce a 4 seconds of silence file. Audacity may be able to produce the MP3 file, or if not you can use iTunes to encode your 4 sec silence to MP3.

Use a program like MP3Trimmer to combine this silence file with your file.

I suggest combining with MP3Trimmer rather than importing both into Audacity and then reexporting because if you re-export it will re-encode your music MP3 causing additional quality loss. MP3Trimmer file combining is splicing files rather than re-encoding.

Mp3Trimmer is shareware but with fairly liberal trial conditions. There may be freeware that does this but I have MP3Trimmer so I haven't investigated further.

What about using a remote control?

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore?productLearnMore=MB1 25G/A

SZ