Hi, I’m Sean Carruthers and welcome to part two of the three-part series on the iPod Shuffle. This time around, we’re going to talk about Playlist Management.
Now with the new iPod Shuffle, let’s introduce a new feature called voice over which it reads out the name of the track that you’re currently listen to with a press of a button, it’s both of blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing for those of us who’re used to the LCD screen. Now with this new player, we can’t actually see what’s playing on the unit itself. So just a click of a button and the iPod will now read out what is playing. So that’s a bit of a blessing. It’s a curse in that – some tracks don’t work so well with this for a couple of reasons and we’ll go over three ways that you can deal with this.
The first thing that maybe causing a problem is long, long track names. So we got two ways to deal with this. Now the first track at the top here is a very, very long track. It’s a hip-hop track featuring a lot of guest artists and that’s you know, fairly common in the world of hip-hop and they’ll often put it to the name of the track. Unfortunately, they will reeve this entire thing out, every time you pres on that button. So you don’t necessarily need that to happen.
So you can just click in here, on the name of the track and get rid of that information there. Hit Return and there you go. Now, it’s so much shorter read. You can also hit Control I on windows or Command I on the Mac when you highlighted on something in – you bring up a list here of the various things that you can do with this track.
Now we’re going to click on Info. You can edit this information here. On the screen, you can edit the name of it and you can also edit the name of the artist to something a little bit shorter. So we’re just going to change that to Alabama, as supposed to the entirety of the name there. And we’ll click OK and that’s done. Or, if you want to do this with multiple tracks, you can actually just click Next to – going through and list all of the tracks on that album and jut shorten down on a one by one basis.
This is also a problem with podcasting, especially with podcast that feature in number of contributors for something like MacBreak Weekly. When you press the button on there and that reads out the name of the track and the artist, it unfortunately lists a great big long list of guest names here. So as much as I love Leo, Andy, Alex and Scott, I don’t necessarily want to hear every single one of their names every time I press on the voice over buttons. So I might just change this to MBW or the Twits or something like that that’s a little bit shorter and easier to you know listen to repeatedly when you press on that button. So that’s one thing that you can do, just shorten the names of the tracks. The ones that will affect you are the name and the artist. So you don’t really need to change album names or anything like that.
The second thing is language. By default, the voice over command is very good at reading North American English. There is an automatic setting on this – for voice over tracks that will try to guess what language is but it doesn’t always work it out as hope. So we’ve got an artist here by name, Jean Michel Jarre. He’s a musician from France. And you know, it may read it out Jean Michel Jarre, and that’s not what we want to hear. So,if you end up with that sort of situation, what you can do again, you can highlight the track, it’s Control I or Command I, go into it and instead of going for Info which is where we were before, we’ll actually go over to Options.
Now we’ve got a list here called Voice Over Language. Right now, it’s set to French because we’ve set that previously. But by default, it’ll come as automatic. So if you want to force it, we’ll switch you over to French. We’ve got a number of other ones here as well including a number of the ones that you’ll actually see up recent, for example so German, Italian, French and some other language including Spanish, Dutch, Czech, Japanese, but not everything obviously so hopefully they’ll add this. But a good chunk of different tracks that you’ll see in the world will be covered by this.
Anyways, that concludes part two. Stick around for part three. We’re going to be dealing with how to deal with the headphones that come up with the iPod Shuffle since it has the controls on there for controlling iPod if you don’t particularly like the headphones or if you want to use headphones of your own.
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