Section 51. Find and Play Music on the iPod


51. Find and Play Music on the iPod

Before You Begin

See Also

Rate Your Music in iTunes

Find and Play Videos on the iPod

Transfer Your Music and Videos to Your iPod

Transfer Only Preferred Music to the iPod

 

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 that's the size and shape of the iPod. Instead, the iPod's navigation wheel takes the place of your mouse's control of iTunes' scrollbars 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 would navigate iTunes itself: You would play music either by selecting a playlist and clicking Play, or by navigating through the Browse lists to find the music you wanted and then double-clicking a song or pressing Play. The way you would navigate in iTunes tells you the way to navigate the iPod to get to the same selection of music.

Find and Play Music on the iPod


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 the Menu button several times until you see the top-level options (Music, Extras, Settings, and so on) and the iPod can't back up any further.

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.

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 and its artist and album information. It also shows the progress bar indicating how far through the song it's played and (if present) 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, you must enable the Display album artwork on your iPod check box on the Music subtab on the iPod tab of the iTunes Preferences window.

If you switch the iPod's display to show the album art at full size, it does not automatically switch back to the Now Playing screen after a few seconds, as it does on other control screens. This means you can set up the iPod in its Dock to show the album art of the music it's playing at all times, and only return to the Now Playing screen by pressing Select when you want to navigate the music again.


Play a Playlist

To play a playlist, 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 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 button. Alternatively, press 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.

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, and 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 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.


Play a Specific Song

To play a specific song that you know by name, 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.

If you know the album where a song is located, you can navigate to it by selecting Music, Albums and then the album name, and then choosing the song from the list of tracks on the album. You can also select Music, Artists, and then the artist name, followed by the album name and the song; or select Music, Genre, the genre you want, the artist name, and then the album name and song. Navigating the iPod menus gives you the same flexibility for finding your music that you have in iTunes. Whether you want to find a song by delving deep into its organizational structures or by zooming right to it by name, you can use whatever method is easiest.

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.


Play a Podcast Episode

Select Music and then Podcasts. Each of the podcasts to which you're subscribed appears in the listing. Just as in iTunes, a podcast that has one or more unlistened-to episodes has a blue dot next to its name.

Select a podcast's name and press Play to begin playing the most recent episode. If you press Select instead, the iPod shows you the list of all available episodes in the podcast, with blue dots indicating which ones you haven't heard yet. Select one and press Play or Select to play it. The iPod keeps track of your place in the episode; if you leave the episode and play other songs or videos and then return to the podcast episode, the iPod picks up where you left off. When the episode is done, you are returned to the list of episodes. The blue dot disappears as soon as you start listening to the episode.

As you play the podcast episode, the included artwork updates automatically with each internal chapter, whether you're viewing the artwork at full size or using the Now Playing screen.

Note

If you play a video podcast by navigating to the Podcasts menu through the Music menu system, the podcast episode plays in an audio-only modethe poster frame for the episode appears as the album art, and only the audio of the episode is played. If you press Select repeatedly, you see the contents of the Description field for the episode, which is not available if you view the episode as a video. (See Find and Play Videos on the iPod.)





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: 2006
Pages: 150
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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