From: Mark Fowler Date: 00:16 on 19 Feb 2004 Subject: iTunes, and remembering it where it was Dear iTunes. Yes, I've heard this bit of this track before. Remember last time when I was half way though this audiobook and it was just getting to the really exciting bit and I had to get off the train and do a load of work and I quit iTunes? No? Oh, you want to go back to where I was when I did this a couple of days ago instead and forget all about this time? I'll guess I'll re-listen to the last ten minutes shall I. Not that that ruins the whole experience. Oh no. Thanks for the excellent seek interface too. I like the only way I can fast forward or rewind in a track is by dragging the slider onscreen. This works really really well when your track is five hours long, and the fact that each pixel maps to a minute and a half when I make the window as large as it can be (as we all know music players should always be run in full screen) isn't a problem whatsoever. Mark.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 00:22 on 19 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: iTunes, and remembering it where it was I have yet to find an audio player that doesn't suck deeply. If you really want to experience hate, Microsoft Reader on the Pocket PC seems to combine all the worst aspects of bad interface, lousy performance, inconvenient plugins, unusable file management, and obtrusive DRM. But it's only a matter of degree, given time every player on every platform hits the sour spot where you either can't do something because it would break some art geek's sense of style, or you can't do something because you can't understand some audio geek's obscure interface (config file, command line, or trendoid GUI) or both in the same program.
From: Matt McLeod Date: 03:21 on 11 Mar 2004 Subject: Re: iTunes, and remembering it where it was (responding to this after such a long while because I just ran into the same situation -- more on that in a moment.) Mark Fowler wrote: > Yes, I've heard this bit of this track before. [...] It does a pretty good job with Audible material, but for some reason doesn't bother with anything else. As they already have the foo in there to do it, it's bloody annoying that they keep it restricted to Audible stuff. > Thanks for the excellent seek interface too. I like the only way I can > fast forward or rewind in a track is by dragging the slider onscreen. This, however, does not appear to be the case. You don't have to drag the thing, just click on the spot where you want it to go. It's not ideal for fine-tuning, but OK for finding the right general bit. I found this stuff out for myself last night because of an annoying "feature" on the iPod. It seems that if you copy a file off it which contains Audible material, the file is deleted. Specifically: I loaded my iPod up with music I wanted to take to work. There were also some audiobooks on there, but I wasn't planning on using them at work, just the music. So I get to work, plug the iPod in, pull up a terminal, and dig around to the music directory (/Volumes/Musicbeast/iPod_Control/Music, from memory) and cp -r the lot to the internal disk on this iMac. Then I tell iTunes to import it all. Works great. Then I get home, and when I go to bed I want to listen to some of the current audiobook. And they're all gone. Along, of course, with my place in the books, so I got to re-load them from my Mac and then use iTunes to find the right spots again. Quite irritating, and I was feeling plenty of hate at the time though I have perhaps calmed down since. Matt
From: Mark Fowler Date: 09:48 on 11 Mar 2004 Subject: Re: iTunes, and remembering it where it was On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Matt McLeod wrote: > It does a pretty good job with Audible material Nah, I have all kinds of problems with audible stuff. All my audiobooks are audiable. All them exibit the same hateful problems. Not Always Just Some Of The Time(tm). Bad Apple. No Cookie. Mark.
From: Matt McLeod Date: 09:52 on 11 Mar 2004 Subject: Re: iTunes, and remembering it where it was Mark Fowler wrote: > On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Matt McLeod wrote: > > > It does a pretty good job with Audible material > > Nah, I have all kinds of problems with audible stuff. All my audiobooks > are audiable. All them exibit the same hateful problems. Not Always Just > Some Of The Time(tm). Hm. The only problem I usually have with them is that the iPod never quite goes back to precisely where I left off. It's within a few minutes either way, though, so it's merely annoying rather than actually hateful. But I don't do audiobooks with iTunes -- I'm either travelling or in bed when listening to them and I have an iPod. If I've got a computer in front of me I'm probably concentrating on something else. (This is in part because the advertised "plug your iPod in and your place in audiobooks is synced" feature doesn't work if you manually put stuff on the iPod.) Matt
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:51 on 11 Mar 2004 Subject: Re: iTunes, and remembering it where it was > Nah, I have all kinds of problems with audible stuff. [...] Me too, and on Windows and the Pocket PC, not an Apple in sight. > Bad Apple. No Cookie. Bad Audible. No renewal. Now I can't re-download my Audible books onto another platform because they're device-locked. And you know what? It's a relief.
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