Results tagged “iPod Classic” from Missing Manuals Blog

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Now Hear This
The iPod's volume-limit controls let you lower the player's maximum loudness level to help protect your (or your child's) ears. On the Nano, set your sonic limits by choosing to Settings→Playback→Volume Limit. On the Classic, choose Settings→Volume Limit. On the Touch, choose Settings→Music→Volume Limit.

Art Collecting By Hand
To make the Cover Flow feature in iTunes look great, use the Advanced→Get Album Artwork command to have the program round up missing album covers for songs in your music library. If you get an alert box with the number of things iTunes couldn't find, click the triangle or plus icon in the box to see what's missing. Click the Save button to dump the notes into a text file that you can use as a shopping list. Now you know what art you need to snag off of the Web from Amazon.com or other cover-rich sites.

The iPod as Pocket Watch
Have your iPod Classic or Nano tell you the time on the main screen--without having to fumble down to the built-in clock. Just choose Settings→Date & Time and select the Time in Title option to always have a clock displayed in the top bar on the iPod screen.

Return to the Beginning
The iPod Shuffle has no screen to tell you what song you're on, but you can get back to the first track in the playlist by quickly pressing the Play/Pause button three times.

Playlist Shortcuts
Right-click (or control-click) any track in the iTunes library and choose Add to Playlist to instantly place that song on an existing playlist. And if you want to see just how many playlists include a particular song already, right-click (or control-click) the track and choose Show in Playlist.

A Touching Story
Turn your iPod Touch into a pocket ebook reader with Lexcycle's free Stanza program, available in the iTunes App Store. Once the app is on your Touch, you can download all kinds of free books and classic works from Stanza's online catalog. The program also lets you adjust the font size and spacing of the onscreen text to make it all easy on the eyes.

A Nano Battery Booster
Want to squeeze out all the music you can between battery charges on that new Nano? Choose Settings→Playback→Energy Saver→On. With Engery Saver on, the Nano's battery-hogging screen gets quickly turned off when you aren't actively clicking buttons or scrolling around menus.

Sort iTunes Music Your Way
Press Control-J (Command-J on a Mac) in iTunes to open up the View Options box--which gives you all sorts of useful columns you can add to iTunes. Some of these include Equalizer settings, Last Played, and Date Added. Click the top of any column in the iTunes window to sort your collection based on that factor. Sorting by Play Count, for example, lets you see which tunes are in heavy rotation and which songs you've been neglecting.

Clip and Save Time
Tired of having to go to Safari first to get to your bookmarked Web faves? The iPod Touch lets you add one-tap shortcut icons called Web Clips right to the Home screen. When you have a site you want to add, tap the + button and then on the "Add to Home Screen" button. When you tap that new icon on the Home screen, Safari opens automatically and takes you right to the part of the page that was on display when you saved it.

My Main Menu
You're not stuck with Apple's default items out on your iPod's main menu screen. If you want a shortcut to your calendar, games, or other favorite destinations, add

Sorry for the long stretch o' nothin' between posts here. As you may have heard, Apple released a whole bunch of new iPods last month and for us in Missing Manual Land, that's a cue to get cracking on a new edition. And we have.

iPod: The Missing Manual, Sixth Edition is off to the printer and will be out in stores soon. In the meantime, here are a few tidbits gleaned from doing this new version of the book.

Click here to preview and order the book.

Quicker naps for your iPod.
There's a quick way to put your iPod Classic or Nano to sleep with one quick tap now—without having to hold down Play/Pause. You can add a "Sleep" option right on your iPod’s main menu. To do so, go to iPod -> Settings -> Main Menu and scroll down toward the bottom of the list. Select "Sleep" and press the center button to add it to your iPod's main menu, where you can select it anytime you want the iPod to take a nap and save its battery power for later.

Fetching missing album art.
Cover Flow on the new iPods makes your music look great, but you get a bunch of gray, generic covers if you don't have the actual album artwork embedded in your song files. You can make iTunes get it for you by choosing Advanced -> Get Album Artwork. Odds are iTunes can find a lot of your missing art, but if it can't, it pops up a message telling you it didn't find everything. But here's the handy part — it tells you which ones it couldn't find when you expand the bottom of the alert message. With this shopping list in hand, you can head over to Amazon and snag the missing image files yourself by searching for the album name. Once you see an image on screen, drag it off the Amazon Web page to your desktop — and then into the empty artwork window for that song in iTunes.