I'm gonna go on a limb and assume 90% of people at chip gatherings/shows are drunk

I'm totally the same way.  I don't know why but when I'm sober, I'm super shy and if or when I actually try to talk to someone new, I just stutter a lot and sound like I only have a quarter of my brain.  But once I get about 2 beers in me, I become super talkative and friendly and the stuttering goes away.

use tunes with endings and then start new tunes? /devil's advocate

if you have no social skills, drink. it helps. if you're heavily anti-alcohol, whatever. but i'm fucking socially retarded and i've found that at the very least a couple of shots before i play completely makes it possible for me to interact with the crowd. also makes it easier to talk with people at shows off the stage and whatnot. the more you drink, the easier it becomes, just don't throw up on stage, unless that is one of your transitions.

i guess this doesn't work if you're like me and have no social skills at all

Yea but the song I crossfaded into was a Merzbow b-side

Has anyone reading this ever emptied a dance floor with a bad crossfade?

Even for dance music I noticed that maintaining a continuous rhythm isn't really necessary if you put on a good show and line the songs up quickly enough. Getting people into a continuous trance has it's benefits, but it really isn't the only way to keep them dancing happily throughout your set.

Not all chipmusic is EDM, and chiptune shows aren't raves / dance clubs. Now, if you're going for the straight up EDM style, yeah, you probably shouldn't have silence between your tracks. I write stuff people can dance to, but I also write stuff that's good for moshing.

At PAX, Nickelpunk suggested this.

Learn to not worry about a few seconds of silence.  In my experience, audiences kinda like it when you say words to them.

just write your sets in a single piggy tracker save, problem solved

Just make a huge 20 minutes set using every single LSDJ slots in one proyect. It takes a lot of practice to use it all (if I can recall correctly nullsleep does this in is Depeche mode minimix).

I've manage to make a 24 minute mixes with this technique. Then just tell a joke and while you're at it simply change into another same lengthy song proyect.

I've seen meneo playing 4-5 minute songs with a single gameboy, and loading them in 20-30 seconds. Meanwhile he justs speaks to the audience telling fun stuff. But you'll need a good stage-persona  to connect with the people.

It's pretty braindead easy to transition between songs on nanoloop, I've found. So my advice would be to use nanoloop. (Join us.)

My personal method to not having any dead air between songs has been to make ambient transition noises in a DAW and just fade them in and out on an ipod or something while I switch between songs that don't blend together well. It masks my dumb fumbling around and also helps set the tone of the performance I think.

why hasn't anybody ever done this before?