Section 46. Find and Play Music on the iPod


46. Find and Play Music on the iPod

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

36 Rate Your Music

42 Transfer Your Music to Your iPod


SEE ALSO

48 Transfer Only Preferred Music to the iPod

49 Create an On-the-Go Playlist


After your iPod is full of music, it's finally time to get down to what you really bought it for: listening to it wherever you go.

The iPod interface is designed to be a physical manifestation of iTunes' controls and navigation system. It doesn't work exactly the same waycontrols such as sliders for volume control and mouse navigation just aren't possible on a device the size and shape of the iPod. Instead, the iPod's navigation wheel takes the place of your mouse's control of iTunes' scroll bars and volume slider, and the Select button in the center of the wheel takes the place of the mouse button. The Play/Pause button works the same as in iTunes, as do the Forward and Back buttons . The remaining button, Menu , takes care of navigating back up through the menu system after you've drilled down to a particular screen.

With these control mappings in mind, think about how you'd navigate iTunes itself: You play music either by selecting a playlist and clicking Play , or by navigating through the Browse lists to find the music you want and then double-clicking a song or pressing Play . How you'd navigate in iTunes tells you how to navigate the iPod to get to the same selection of music.

1.
Start at the Main Menu

First make sure that the Hold switch (on the top of the unit) is not engaged; if the iPod's screen is blank, press any button to wake up the iPod from sleep. It's possible that what appears on the display is a deeply buried menu such as Songs or Settings , or the Now Playing screen; to return to the Main Menu, press Menu several times until you see the top-level options ( Music, Extras, Settings , and so on) and the iPod can't back up any further.

2.
Shuffle Songs

The easiest way to start your iPod playing, and perhaps the one you'll use most often, is Shuffle Songs . This option, with a single touch of the Select button, makes a single huge playlist out of all the songs on the iPod, shuffles them into a random order, and then begins playing them.

46. Find and Play Music on the iPod


TIP

If you don't like a song that comes up in Shuffle Songs mode, just press the Forward button to skip to the next one. Remember that the Last Played count is incremented at the end of the song, so unless you listen to a song all the way through, iTunes won't count it as having been listened to.

After the iPod has been playing music for several seconds, it switches to the Now Playing screen. This screen shows you the name of the current song as well as its artist and album information; it also shows the progress bar indicating how far through the song it's played, and (if you have an iPod photo) the song's album art. Press Menu to return to the Main Menu, where the Now Playing option is an extra entry at the bottom of the list; if you don't do anything for a few seconds, the iPod reverts to the Now Playing screen.

NOTE

To display album art on your iPod photo, you must enable the Display album artwork on your iPod check box on the Music tab in the iPod pane of the iTunes Preferences window.

3.
Play a Playlist

To play a playlist, first start at the Main Menu as in step 1; then select the Music option and press Select . Roll the wheel to highlight the Playlists option in the Music menu; press Select again. All your iTunes' playlists are shown in the next screen.

TIP

While a song is playing and the Now Playing screen is showing, you can control the iPod's sound volume simply by rolling the navigation wheel back and forth.

Roll the wheel to move the cursor to the playlist you want to play. To begin playing the playlist from the beginning, press the Play/Pause button, not the Select buttonpress Select to open the playlist so that you can browse its contents. If you want to start the playlist at a specific song, press Select to browse the playlist, scroll using the wheel until you highlight the song you want, and then press Select one final time (alternatively, press Play/Pause ).

Choose Settings from the Main Menu and turn on Shuffle (by toggling the Shuffle option to Songs or Albums mode, which proceeds through random selections of songs or whole randomly selected albums, respectively), to make the iPod skip randomly to another song in the selected category (artist, album, genre , playlist, and so on) after it finishes playing any song.

4.
Play an Entire Genre, Artist, or Album

Press Menu repeatedly to return to the Main Menu. Select the Music option again, as you did in step 3; this time, choose an option such as Artists, Albums , or Genres . When you select one of these options, all the entries within that category are selected: for example, all the albums represented by the music copied to your iPod from your iTunes Library are listed alphabetically in the Albums menu.

Scroll to select an album name, then press Play/Pause to play that album from the beginning. Alternatively, open the album by pressing Select , scroll to a specific song you want to hear, and press Select or Play/Pause . The album plays starting with the selected song.

You can play the entire contents of any category by selecting that category name and pressing Play/Pause ; for example, if you navigate into the Artists menu and scroll to highlight the Eagles, pressing Play/Pause plays all the Eagles' songs in all their albums from beginning to end, just as they're sorted in iTunes itself according to the inherent cascading sort behaviors defined by the songs' info tags .

TIP

The iPod's navigation wheel features acceleration , a term that describes faster perceived motion of the cursor in response to fast or sustained motion of the input device. In other words, in the case of the iPod, the longer you continuously rotate the wheel, the faster it scrolls through the options on the screen. If you have hundreds or thousands of songs or albums on your iPod, this feature makes it possible to zero in on a particular entry in the alphabetical list without having to roll and roll the wheel for minutes on end. Learning to control the wheel's acceleration takes a little bit of practice, but before long, it comes naturally.

5.
Play a Specific Song

To play a specific song, start at the Main Menu (press Menu repeatedly until the iPod can back up no further). Navigate into Music once more, and then into the Songs submenu. All the songs on the iPod are listed in alphabetical order here. Scroll through them using the wheel, taking advantage of the wheel's acceleration to zoom in on the song you want. Press Select or Play/Pause to begin playing that song. When the song is over, the iPod proceeds to the next song in the list.

TIP

To scan through a playing song to a particular point, first go to the Now Playing screen (either by navigating to it from the Main Menu, or by simply waiting a few seconds for the iPod to switch to it automatically); then press Select to switch to scan mode. Use the wheel to move the playhead back and forth through the song. When you stop moving the playhead, the iPod resumes normal playback at the point where you put the playhead.




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

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net