Hi Simon, Tim Kilburn's web pages about VoiceOver has some pointers about using iTunes and creating playlists:
http://homepage.mac.com/kilburns/voiceover/itunes7.html Do you want to burn these songs as audio CDs or as data CDs (or DVDs)? If you're only concerned about playing these back or restoring/transferring them to your computer (or to another PC or Mac that runs iTunes), any one of these formats will work, and you can "play" from the CD or DVD. If you want to burn these as audio CDs, you should figure that each CD will hold something like 70-80 minutes worth of music. Very roughly, you'll be able to fit ten times as many songs that you purchase from the iTunes Store on a CD that you write as a data disc as you will if you write them as an audio CD. However, you'll be able to play the audio CD on any CD player, while your data disc will only play on a computer with iTunes which you have "authorized" to play your music (in the case of iTunes songs with DRM -- anything other songs on the data disc will simply play in another iTunes on PC or Mac). How do you want to organize your songs on the CD? I find that I can do a lot of this just by sorting or using the search text field so that the entries in the Songs Outline are ordered just as I want. Then I just select all (Command-a) and use the shortcut Command-shift-n (for new playlist from selection) to create a playlist, and then assign that playlist a name. You can also start from the "Purchased" playlist in your Sources Outline, which should list your songs in the order you purchased them. If you want to organize these by Album, you can sort on the Album column in the iTunes Songs outline (this also places the songs in the order they appear in an individual album). VO-right arrow to the column you want to sort on; VO-Shift-Backslash will sort this. If you apply this a second time the sort order will change between ascending to descending. If you want to sort on more fields -- including your own comments! -- just use Command-j to bring up the list of View options and check any entries you want to appear as columns in the Songs outline. Then sort away! Once you have these in the order you want, just select all of these items or a block of these in sequence and create a playlist, or add these items as a block to a playlist. You can also build up playlists that are made up of other playlists, either by directly selecting the tracks in those playlists and adding them to another playlist with the contextual menu, or by using smart playlists. Smart playlists will also allow you to select by a whole other set of rules -- which songs you've played the most, or added to your library in the last week, or haven't listened to in the last month, or have rated to be 5 star, or have been played exactly one time and are in the classical genre, etc. (smile, you get the picture). And you can also sort on any column of your smart playlist to reorder them, too! See Tim's page for some more details. You should also read how to set the burning preferences. HTH Cheers, Esther On June 03, 2008, at 08:19AM, Simon Cavendish wrote: >Hi everyone, > >Has anyone done a tutorial on how to use Voiceover to add new songs to >a playlist with a view to burning it? I've just learnt how to purchase >songs from the Itune store and have happily downloaded a bunch of >wonderful tracks. I am keen to burn them onto a CD. I've read the help >file in Itunes but it is all very visual and drag and drop based. I >seem to think that many of you experienced Mac users have been doing >this business of creating new playing lists and burning for a long >time. Can it be achieved without sight with Voiceover? > >Thanks in advance > >Simon > > >
