Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

My regular iPod is that first generation nano, the one that was notorious for being easy to scratch. Mine is as near-flawless as a nano can be. I really baby it. I recently started using an iPod Shuffle as well, the intention being that it would be my, who cares if it gets dinged, knockabout model.

It’s great in that role, and I also really enjoy the way I can easily access the various controls by feel alone. However, in using the Shuffle I also discovered another stress relieving side effect: I no longer care about the state of the battery.

Even though the battery meter on the nano is grossly inaccurate, I found that I was constantly mindful of my remaining state of charge, and wondering whether I should plug it in just to top it up, or wait until it was in the red zone in order to prolong its overall life.

With the Shuffle I just don’t care. I plug it in, often two or three times a day to re-sync the status of my podcasts and audio books, and I really have no idea whether the battery is near full, or near empty, and neither do I care. It’s never run out on me.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that great technology is indistinguishible from magic, and so it seems that way with the Shuffle and the way it “just works.”

Mmm. Well. I was kind of right about the nano, totally wrong about iTunes and missed the Touch thing altogether. The best news, and it’s kind of hidden away, is that there are new headphones with remote controls for volume, skipping, pausing and making voice notes.

The Touch now has a real speaker built in, instead of a piezo beeper speaker, so that makes the countdown timer and alarm imminently more useful; should be good for listening to podcasts un-tethered as well.

The Classic line has been reduced to one model, as thin as the 80 gig, but with 120 gigs capacity. Perhaps that same drive will go in the MacBook Air, giving it a 50% boost in capacity.

Ok. Apple special event time again tomorrow morning. Here are my hunches/predictions:

1. iTunes will have a major revamp and it will be renamed iMedia or some such thing, to reflect the fact that it’s just as much about movies and iPhone apps as it is about music.

2. There will be a music subscription service where for $15 a month you can download all the music you want, but when you stop paying, that music disappears.

3. A new iPod nano, like the generation 2 model, but with the wheel at the bottom and the rest of the front taken up with a vertical screen. Flip it sideways for screening movies and the new orientation of the wheel is reflected by a virtual wheel that appears on the screen whenever you touch the real one.

4. Announcement that 10 million iPhones have now been sold. Thanks for coming. Goodbye. Event ends with some hip band playing live.

I have an iPod nano and I usually charge it up using the USB connection to the Mac; only thing is, this only works while the iMac G5 is awake. I rediscovered just recently though that I can also charge it from the Mac via firewire, while the Mac is asleep.

Hooray!

I may have heard also that one of Leopard’s 300 new features is that they turned on USB charging while asleep as well…

Here is the scenario: you have a six CD audio book that you rip into iTunes. You then select all the tracks in the resulting enormous Album in iTunes and choose to Remember Position in each track, and you set the combined play count to zero.

You make a Smart Playlist for listening to the book, similar to the configuration shown above; each time you re-visit this playlist it picks up where you left off, and only shows the remaining unheard tracks. All fine and good.

But, the problem is that you also want to take the book with you, but the iPod that you use only has a limited capacity. Here’s the trick:

You can make a second Smart Playlist that refers to the first. This one is limited by size to whatever you can spare (in this case, 50MB). Now you set up your iPod to sync with the second Playlist.

When you’re at your Mac you can listen to either; they will automatically update each other. Why have two at all though? Why not just create the second 50MB Playlist? Well, the short Playlist is the slice off the top of the pile of files still to be heard; the long Playlist is the whole pile, which gives you more of a sense of how far there is to go.

Playlists can’t easily be duplicated or copied and then modified, but by using new Playlists that refer to existing ones you can make refined choices based on existing criteria.

Here’s my latest iPod and iTunes discovery. Well, here’s the problem first, and this relates back to this entry. I like to take the latest podcasts downloaded as files directly from their sites, rather than from the iTunes Store, and as I listen to them I want to mark them and then see a list of “yet to be heard” files.

I didn’t realize until now that smart playlists were also “smart” when they got on the iPod, but they are, or so it seems. So my new playlist looks at the New Podcast playlist and only shows the files that haven’t got three stars.

To summarize: I use the new playlist to listen to the new tracks, and when I’ve heard what I want to from a track I simply give it three stars; when I revisit the list the track is no longer there. If I change my mind I can still easily find it through the New Podcast playlist.

I use my nano mainly to listen to podcasts. For various reasons that aren’t important here, I prefer to download them as files directly from their sites, rather than from the iTunes Store.

I use a smart playlist to transfer the latest ones to the iPod. I couldn’t figure out a way to have that playlist know that I’d already listened to enough of a particular podcast on the iPod that I no longer wanted it to sync to it.

Then I decided to use the ratings stars. When I’m on the go and I decide I’m done with a track and don’t want it on the iPod any more, I rate it with three stars. Next time I sync those three stars appear on the Mac, and the next sync takes the track off the iPod because of the rule in the screenshot above.

There’s probably a more elegant solution than this that I’m just not seeing. This works for now. Any suggestions?