iTunes - "Skip When Shuffling" -- it's about freakin' time.

[gmoney]

Apparently someone at Apple wised up to what a pain in the ass it was to use audiobooks with iTunes. It used to be that if you put your player on Shuffle, you'd be rockin' along just fine, then it would throw in a random chunk of Chapter 7 of Al Gore's "The Assault on Reason" -- which while it is a fine book, doesn't have much of a beat and is lousy to dance to. (Or is Al Gore just the world's worst rapper?) So, I'd have to leave all my audiobook tracks unchecked so it wouldn't randomly throw them in the mix, but that made it tricky to transfer them to my iPod in case I actually wanted to listen to an audiobook.

Just discovered that you can now set audio tracks to "Media Kind" as either Music or Audiobook, and skip when shuffling, so audiobooks and music now CAN co-exist on my iPod. "Remember playback position" is useful if you stop listening, you can come back to it later and it'll remember your place, like a bookmark. Podcasts already seem to do this. And of course, you've been able to set the equalizer to "Spoken Word" for a long time.



Sometimes Apple DOES find a clue...

[cbayer]

1. Yay!! I agree.

Many the time I have been listening to music, only to be rudely interrupted by the droning of a speaker completely out of context.

:toast:

[Atman]

2. It's been there for a long time, man!

I couldn't have lived without it...nearly 4000 songs on my iPod, who the hell wants to hear Windham Hill or Jesus Christ Superstar while they're snowboarding or playing music for a party? I keep all the more esoteric tracks and mood music, etc, on "Skip when shuffling" and have done so for a couple of years.

Glad you found it, though. It IS handy.

.