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

Getting Addressed

The iPod wasn't always a contact manager…or was it? Let's look at the history and state of the art in configuring iPod contacts.

First on the Block: iPod Organizer

It would be incorrect to credit Apple with being the first to think of using the original Macintosh-compatible iPod as a personal information manager (PIM). It didn't take savvy users more than a couple of days after the iPod's general release to figure out that by creating very short, empty MP3 files and editing the Artist, Album, and Song information to include names and phone numbers, you could construct a crude contact database of your own (see the sidebar "Crude Contacts" in this section).

Only someone with few contacts or the patience of a saint would be willing to go through this kind of rigmarole. Fortunately, not long after the release of the iPod, ProVue Development ([www.provue.com]) released iPod Organizer, a $20 Macintosh application created with the company's Panorama database package.

iPod Organizer basically is a run-time version of Panorama that allows you to add information to the iPod's Song, Artist, and Album fields. It works this way:

An iPod Organizer record (entry) contains seven fields: Category, First Name, Last Name, Organization, Data, Source, and Notes (Figure 7.1). The first five fields are transferred to the iPod; the program uses the last two for internal housekeeping and for notes you want to keep on the Mac. Data entered in the Category fieldsomething like My Friends or Burger Joints, for exampleappears in the iPod's Artist screen. First Name, Last Name, and Organization appear in the Album screen. And dataphone numbers and addresses, for exampleappears in the Songs screen (the information that scrolls in the iPod's display).

If you care to enter information other than phone numbers and addresses in iPod Organizer, you're welcome to do so. Create a to-do list. Jot down the few items you need to pick up at the store.Or squirrel away the computer passwords you routinely forget.Knock yourself out.

After you've entered the information you want to use in your records, iPod Organizer moves the data to iTunes. When you next update your iPod, the information you entered in iPod Organizer transfers to the iPod.

There's a lot of power and convenience on iPod Organizer's front end, thanks to the driving force of the run-time version of Panorama. But the process that takes place within iTunes and on the iPod is no different from the one I outline in the sidebar "Crude Contacts." iPod Organizer simply creates the number of empty MP3 files it needs and copies the data into the Song, Artist, and Album fields in iTunes; then iTunes transfers those MP3 files to the iPod. Very clever.

Crude Contacts

With today's iPod software, you can easily create and add contacts to your Mac or Windows iPod. But if you'd care to re-create a bit of recent history and cobble together your own crude contacts, here's how:

Mac OS9: Creating Short Audio Files with SimpleSound

1. Create and save an audio file about 5 seconds long.

If you're running Mac OS 9.2 or earlier, you can do this by launching SimpleSound (usually located in the Apple Extras folder inside the Mac OS 9 Applications folder) and clicking the Add button in the resulting Alert Sounds window.

2. When the recording window appears, click the Record button, allow SimpleSound to record 5 seconds of silence, click Stop (if necessary), and then click the Save button (Figure 7.2).

3. Give the file a descriptive name, such as Blank MP3, when you're prompted.

4. Quit SimpleSound and any other running applications.

5. Open the System Folder; then double-click the System file.

6. Drag your Blank MP3 file out of the System file and onto your Desktop.

Mac OS X: Creating Short Audio Files with AudioX

1. Create and save an audio file about 5 seconds long.

OS X doesn't include a utility for recording sound, so you'll have to grab one from the Web. The $20 AudioX ([www.realmacsoftware.com/audiox.php]) is an easy-to-use recording application.

2. Using AudioX or a similar tool, record 5 seconds of silent audio, and save your file (Figure 7.3).

3. Launch iTunes, and choose the Preferences command (in the Edit menu in Mac OS 9.2 and earlier and in the iTunes menu in Mac OS X).

4. In the iTunes Preferences dialog box, click the Importing tab, choose MP3 Encoder from the Import Using pop-up menu, and click OK (Figure 7.4).

5. Choose Convert Selection to MP3 from iTunes' Advanced menu, and navigate to the Blank MP3 file you created.

iTunes converts that file to MP3 format.

Windows XP: Creating Short Audio Files with Sound Recorder

1. Launch Sound Recorder (located in the Entertainment folder within Windows' Accessories folder).

2. Record 5 seconds of silent audio.

3. Choose Properties from the File menu.

4. Choose Playback Formats from the pop-up menu, and click Convert Now.

5. In the resulting Sound Selection window, choose PCM from the Format pop-up menu and 44.100 kHz, 16-bit Stereo from the Attributes pop-up menu; then click OK.

6. Name and save your file.

7. Launch iTunes, and choose Preferences from the Edit menu.

8. In the resulting window click the Importing tab and choose MP3 Encoder from the Import Using pop-up menu. Click OK to dismiss the window.

9. Drag your silent sound into the iTunes window, and select it.

10. Choose Convert Selection to MP3 from the Advanced menu.

Adding Your Contact Information

To edit the tag information necessary for creating your contact, follow these steps in iTunes for Macintosh or Windows:

1. After you've recorded a short audio file, click the Blank MP3 "song" that's now in iTunes' main window, and press Command-I to produce the Song Information window.

2. Where the song title appears, enter your contact's name and any bit of information you'd like to scroll across the screen of your iPodan address, for example.

3. In the Artist field, enter a bit of information that will fit on the iPod's screena phone number, perhaps.

4. Use the Album field for some similarly small bit of information (Figure 7.5).

5. Click OK.

6. Update your iPod.

7. Select your iPod in the Source list, and choose Update Songs on the name of your iPod.

8. Detach your iPod from your computer, navigate to the Songs screen, scroll down until you find the contact you just created, and click the Select button.

The information you entered in the Song Title field scrolls across the screen from right to left, and the Artist and Album information appears below. If the information advances too quickly to the next song (after all, the iPod thinks that it's a 5-second song and will go on to the next tune after it's finished playing your short ditty), click the Play/Pause button to pause playback.

To refine this technique but lose one of your fields, create several of these files, and enter the same information in the Album or Artist fieldMy Family, for example. This method allows you to group contacts.

You can also group contacts by creating group playlistsplaylists that contain nothing but the names of members of your family or the members of your company softball team.

9. Breathe a sigh of relief that you no longer have to do this kind of thing to get contacts into your iPod.

Viva vCard

Whether iPod Organizer motivated Apple to add its own contact management to the iPod is something that only Apple knows. All that really matters is that Apple was motivated thusly, and contacts became part of the iPod experience with the release of iPod Software 1.1 Updater (and remained part of that experience in subsequent software updates).

The magic behind contact management on the iPod is the vCard standard.

The vCard standard

In the mid-1990s, Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Siemens founded an initia tive called Versit that created the vCard standard. This standard allows you to store electronically such information as names, addresses (business, home, mailing, and parcel), telephone numbers (home, business, fax, pager, mobile, ISDN, voice, data, and video), email addresses, and Internet addresses on computers, personal information managers, and cellular telephones. The standard also offers graphics support for photographs and logos. Audio and time-zone information is supported as well.

The standard is platform-agnostic, so you can share vCards among computers running a variety of operating systemsMac OS, Windows, and Linux, for exampleas well as with cellular phones and personal digital assistants, such as devices running the Palm operating system. vCard support is built into products from such vendors as Apple, IBM, Lotus, Lucent Technologies, Netscape, Now Software, and Microsoft.

vCard and you

Fascinating as the history of the vCard format may be, its story becomes a lot more gripping when you understand that with very little muss or fuss, you can move information from products that support versions 2.1 and 3.0 of the vCard standard to your iPod. Before you break out the champagne, however, you should know that the iPod supports only a portion of the vCard standard. You can't view a graphic, for example, or listen to a sound contained in a vCard file stored on your iPod.

Here's the information that your iPod can display:

Contact's formatted name.
Bubba Jones, for example.

Contact's name.
The name as it appears in the contact (Jones, Bubba, Dr., for example).

Contact's address(es).
The address types supported by vCard (business, home, mailing, and parcel).

Contact's telephone number(s).
The phone numbers supported by vCard.

Contact's email.
The email addresses in the contact.

Contact's title.
Dr., Ms., Mr., and so on.

Contact's organization.
The company name displayed in the contact.

Contact's URL.
The Internet address contained in the contact.

Contact's note.
The note field in the contact.

vCard support wouldn't mean much if common applications didn't support it. Fortunately, the universal nature of the standard means that most information-management and email applications you're likely to run across support vCard. As this book goes to press, vCard support is present on the Mac in OS X's Address Book, Qualcomm's Eudora, Bare Bones Software's Mailsmith, Microsoft's Entourage email clients, and Palm's Palm Desktop 4.x and Now Software's Now Contact information managers. For Windows, you'll find vCard supported in such mainstays as Windows' Address Book, Microsoft Outlook, and Palm Desktop. (The Windows version of Qualcomm's Eudora doesn't support vCards.)

iPod Sorting

Before the release of the iPod Software 1.2 Updater, you had limited ways to sort contacts on the iPod. If a contact's name within the vCard began with his or her first name, by gum, that's how it would be displayed on the iPod. Sure, you could edit the vCard file to swap the position of each contact's first and last name, but what an unholy bother.

Fortunately, Apple has made contact sorting much easier. Just highlight the Settings entry in the iPod's main screen, press Select, and scroll down to Contacts. Press Select again, and you'll find the Sort and Display options. Each option allows you to select First and Last or Last and First, thus allowing you to sort by last name but display your contacts' first name first and last name…well, last.