Secrets of the iPod and iTunes (Fifth Edition) [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

The Get Info Window

If you peek in iTunes' File menu, you'll find the Get Info command. Choosing this command produces the Song Information dialog box (Figure 2.23) for the selected song (or songs). You don't need to be concerned about a lot of what goes on in this dialog box; some settings apply only to iTunes. But it is worth your while to look at the portion of the dialog box that appears when you click the Info tab.

In the Info tab, you'll find Artist and Album fields (along with the Name field, which appears at the top of every tab in this dialog box). The information in these fieldstermed ID3tags is carried over to the iPod. You may find occasions when it's helpful to change the information in these fields. If you have two versions of the same songperhaps one from the CD and another as a live recordingyou could change the song title of the latter to include (Live). Or if you discover that the iPod splits an artist into different groupingsElvis Costello, and Elvis Costello and the Attractions, for exampleand you'd like all the songs by that artist to appear below a single heading, you can edit the Artist field.

Although you could click the Next and Previous buttons to change the settings of adjacent songs in the Library, it's not always necessary to do that. To change these fields in a group of songs, select a bunch of tunes in the Library, Shift-click the first and last songs in the series of titles you want to edit, or Command-click (Mac) or Ctrl-click (Windows) to select individual songs and then choose Get Info. This action produces the Multiple Song Information dialog box (Figure 2.24), where you can change the Artist, Album, Genre, and Comments fields for every selected song in one fell swoop.

The Beats Go On

If you listened very carefully on the day iTunes 4 was announced, you heard a tiny whoop of joy from a small community of iTunes users who discovered that a beats-per-minute (bpm) tag has been added to the Info portion of iTunes' Get Info window. Why the hubbub? It seems that the iPod is very popular with DJsfor the obvious reason that it's a heck of a lot easier to carry a rave's worth of music on a device smaller than a pack of smokes than it is to lug around a crate full of records and CDs.

Beat matchingblending the beats of songs as you transition from one to the otheris an important part of the DJ trade. For this technique to work seamlessly, the number of beats per minute of the two songs must match; each must thump along at 121 beats per minute, for example.

Although iTunes 4 doesn't grant you the power to speed up or slow down a song to make it match another groove, it does allow you to sort songs and create playlists based on beats per minute. Have an early-evening gig where the crowd needs a bit of a push to get going? Coolthrow together a playlist with tempos of 130 bpm. When it's time to trance out in the wee hours, pull up the 96-bpm playlist.

Chapter 1 that the equalizer settings you impose in iTunes carry over to the iPod. You can also change the equalizer preset for all the songs you've selected by choosing a preset from the Equalizer Preset pop-up menu. If you want to change the EQ settings for a single song, select that song, select Get Info, click the Options tab in the resulting Song Information dialog box, and choose a preset from the Equalizer Preset pop-up menu.

Sound Check

Sound Check, added with the October 2002 iPods and iTunes 3, lives on in the current iPods and iTunes 4. (Sorry, it's not available in iTunes 2.) This feature attempts to address an all-too-common problem: The volume among songs (particularly songs from different albums) varies to the point that you must fiddle with the iPod's volume control constantly to maintain a consistent sound level.

When Sound Check is engaged, it analyzes the volume levels of all the songs in iTunes' Library and boosts the volume of quieter tunes so that their level more closely matches that of louder songs. This doesn't mean that Sound Check will alter individual volumes within a single tunein other words, the pianissimo passages in the Rubinstein recording of Chopin's Nocturnes won't suddenly become fortissimo. Rather, the overall volume of those Nocturnes will be raised, so you won't feel compelled to crank the volume after listening to Mahler's 8th Symphony.

In designing this feature, Apple had to make some trade-offs. For Sound Check to function flawlessly, it would have to spend hours analyzing your iTunes Library. Knowing that its customers were unlikely to put up with seemingly endless analysis, Apple designed Sound Check so that it brings volumes closer together than they were beforewith the idea that although you may not be able to give up fiddling with the volume in iTunes and on the iPod, you'll fiddle less often.

To make Sound Check work on your iPod, you must first tell Sound Check to do its stuff with your iTunes Library. To do so, choose Preferences from the iTunes menu on the Mac or the Edit menu on the PC, click the Effects button to open the Effects dialog box, and check the Sound Check checkbox (Figure 2.25). When you click OK in the Preferences dialog box, iTunes begins analyzing the songs in iTunes' library.

When your iPod is next updated, its music files will be ready for the Sound Check feature. To switch it on, choose Settings in the iPod's main screen, select Sound Check, and press the Select button to choose On.

Unsound Check?

Browse Apple's Discussions forums ([http://discussions.info.apple.com]), and you'll find more than one post that contests the effectiveness of Sound Check. If you're a Mac user who's disappointed with Sound Check, wander over to [www.mani.de/en/software/macosx/ivolume/64] and download iVolume. This $7 utility from Manfred Lippert sets all the songs in your iTunes Library to the same perceived loudness (Figure 2.26). Note that due to copy-protection issues, iVolume currently does not work with songs that were purchased from the iTunes Music Store since the release of iTunes 4.5, according to the plug-in's publisher.