Section 44. Autofill Your iPod Shuffle


44. Autofill Your iPod Shuffle

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

4 Connect Your iPod for the First Time

9 Import a Music CD into iTunes

20 Purchase Audio from the iTunes Music Store


SEE ALSO

39 Use the Party Shuffle Playlist

43 Use a Large iTunes Library with a Small iPod

48 Transfer Only Preferred Music to the iPod


The Flash-based iPod shuffle, available in 512MB or 1GB varieties, is a much simpler device than the rest of the iPod linelacking a display, it gives its owner a lower-cost alternative to the iPods whose high level of portable playback control is offset by their higher prices. With the iPod shuffle, you can't directly select a playlist or artist as you can with a regular iPod; instead, you get the (perhaps dubious) enjoyment of letting the iPod shuffle pick a song at random from the list of only several dozen that its internal Flash disk can hold. That's the value proposition of this member of the iPod family: For a much lower price than a regular iPod, you get a tiny, fun player whose shuffled (random) playback characteristics give it personality. Certainly, when compared to its competition (other Flash players whose tiny screens barely justify their extra cost), the iPod shuffle's price-to-feature-set balance seems like a sensible one.

Even if you can see past the iPod shuffle's limitations and teach yourself to love it for them, it's hard to deny that without a good way to control the music that gets put on the device, the iPod shufflewhose 512MB or 1GB capacity is virtually guaranteed to be much smaller than your iTunes Library barely has a chance. Fortunately, iTunes provides just such a feature: Autofill . The Autofill feature is similar to the Party Shuffle playlist (see 39 Use the Party Shuffle Playlist ) in that you configure it by selecting a source (the library or a selected playlist), and then fill the iPod shuffle by telling iTunes to grab a random selection of songs from that source and matching a few criteria that you define.

KEY TERM

Autofill A technique for selecting just enough songs at random from a specified source to fill your iPod shuffle to capacity. With one button click, you can copy a whole new set of music to the device.


44. Autofill Your iPod Shuffle


Autofill works in tandem with manual updating of the iPod shuffle; you can fill the device with songs you drag in manually from the library, or you can Autofill it and then replace songs you don't like with other ones you do (just as you can with the Party Shuffle playlist). In essence, the loss of control over your music that's inherent in the iPod shuffle's lack of a display isn't so much of a loss at allthe control of the flow of your music has merely been moved back into iTunes.

1.
Connect the iPod Shuffle

Remove the protective cap from the iPod shuffle's USB connector and plug the device into any available USB port on your computer (on the Mac, a convenient port is on the back or side of the keyboard). The iPod shuffle appears in the Source pane in the iTunes' window, listed by the name you gave it when you first connected it to your computer (see 4 Connect Your iPod for the First Time ). Click its name to view the iPod shuffle's contents.

2.
Choose the Source to Autofill From

At the bottom of the screen is a gray bar, specific to the iPod shuffle, with several buttons and options to help you pick the music with which to fill your iPod shuffle. First, choose a source from the Autofill from drop-down list. This source can be your entire library, a playlist, or a Smart Playlist of your choice. The source you choose can be especially useful if you want to limit your iPod shuffle's repertoire to only a certain genre , or to songs rated three stars or higher. See 35 Create a Smart Playlist for more information on making useful Smart Playlists.

3.
Choose Autofill Options

The Replace all songs when Autofilling check box determines whether songs you've manually dragged to the iPod shuffle are replaced when you click the Autofill button to copy a new selection of music to the device. Disable this check box if you want the flexibility of filling the iPod shuffle partway with manually selected songs and then Autofilling the rest. If you leave this option enabled, clicking Autofill deletes all songs from the iPod shuffle and replaces them all with new random selections.

The Choose songs randomly check box ensures that music is chosen arbitrarily from throughout the selected music source rather than from the top of the list as it's currently sorted.

Finally, the Choose higher rated songs more often option uses the My Rating field to "weight" selected songsas is true in the Party Shuffle feature, a song rated with 5 stars stands a five times better chance of being chosen for Autofill than a song rated with 1 star.

4.
Downsample High Bit Rate Files Automatically

Open the iTunes Preferences window (choose iTunes, Preferences on the Mac or Edit, Preferences in Windows). On the iPod tab are several options for the iPod shuffle, considerably different from the ones available for disk-based iPods. One of these options is Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC for this iPod . If you enable this option, iTunes saves space on your iPod shuffle by downsampling songs that are recorded at a bit rate higher than 128 kilobits per secondthat is, it re-encodes them into AAC format at that bit rate. This option does not affect the saved format of these files within your iTunes Library , and 128Kbps AAC files generally sound pretty goodso this might be a good option to turn on. Every little bit of Flash space you can save helps!

Click OK to save your settings and close the Preferences window.

5.
Autofill the iPod Shuffle

Back in the iTunes' window, click the Autofill button. iTunes selects enough songs from your selected music source to fill the iPod shuffle completely, and immediately begins transferring them to the device.

NOTE

The iPod shuffle uses a USB 1.1 (a.k.a. USB Full-speed) interface, so the transfer of all the selected songs can take 10 minutes or more at the interface's full 12Mbps speed.

6.
Rearrange the iPod Shuffle's Contents

When the transfer of songs to the iPod shuffle is complete, all the songs now on the iPod shuffle appear in the listing window. As you can with any playlist, click and drag to rearrange the order of the songs as they appear on the iPod shuffle. The randomized playbackthe vaunted "shuffle"takes effect only if the slider switch on the back of the iPod shuffle is switched to the "shuffle" position; if it's in the straight-playback position (the middle), playback occurs according to the play order you specify in iTunes by dragging songs into position according to your taste.

TIP

There's no need to wait for iTunes to finish transferring songs to the iPod shuffle before you start rearranging them; even while iTunes and the iPod shuffle are synchronizing, you can reorder or delete songs, and your changes are immediately reflected on the device.

Select a song and press Delete or Del to remove it from the iPod shuffle; switch to the library source and drag songs from it to the iPod shuffle to fill in the gaps created by your deletions. If you disabled the Replace all songs when Autofilling option, you can simply click Autofill again to pick enough randomly selected songs to fill the rest of the device, leaving the existing songs alone.

As soon as the data transfer is finished and iTunes displays iPod update is complete , you can unplug the iPod shuffle from your computer. If you had selected Enable disk use in the Preferences window, you must eject ( unmount ) the device first by clicking the Eject icon next to the iPod shuffle's name in the Source pane; otherwise you risk data loss or corruption.



iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap
iPod + iTunes for Windows and Mac in a Snap (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672328992
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 152
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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