Hi David and Others,
David Truong wrote:
Hi,
Well, what is great about VLC for a start is the fact that you
don't have to
import anything just to play what you want. This means I can load
a bunch
of tracks in a m3u playlist for example and have it load and play
in seconds
not in minutes or hours. Now I am talking big play lists here such
as 500
to 5000 tracks not 10 or 20 tracks. But you are right with your
comment
regarding using what works best for you and for me it's VLC.
David, you do know about Leopard's Quick Look feature, don't you?
Select a file and press the space bar to play music files without
importing them to iTunes. Press the space bar again to stop. This is
incredibly helpful because you could be using Finder to go through a
bunch of (badly or completely untagged) mp3 files with names like
1.mp3, 2.mp3, etc. and no knowledge of their contents, and you can
simply hit space bar to start playing them (without even loading any
application, much less starting up VLC or iTunes). This also extends
to an amazing range of files: movie files, documents, PDF files, Word
documents. I've found I can use this to look at system preference
(.plist) files which were changed over to binary format in Tiger and
either had to be opened in a plist ediror or transformed with a
command-line conversion before version. There are even plug-ins to
extend capability to archived files. This is extremely fast, and can
be used in a lot of ways that you might not expect. For example, you
sent a whole batch of files to the Trash, and are now wondering
whether these included the one memo that you wanted to keep. You go
down the list and space bar to quickly sample each one. You can't use
Quick Look to preview DRM-protected files (but then you couldn't use
VLC to play any of those files, either), and you can't edit files you
Quick Look (need to open an actual application for that), but they
sure are convenient and fast to launch.
You should certainly continue to use the application that works best
for you. Here's one of the iTunes features I like for audio book
listening and how it works on the iPod Nano 4G. This uses iTunes/
iPod's features for (1) smart playlists that dynamically update, (2)
auto-sync'ing options, (3) book marking, and (4) editing multiple
items at once. It works for audio books that are multiple mp3 files,
and aren't from Audible.com or the iTunes Store, allows me to always
resume playback where I left off, and can automatically clear off
books I finish listening to whenever I connect my Nano whenever I
connect. (It works for all Nanos and iPods other than the Shuffle,
but my Nano 4G will also talk to me <grin>,)
I select all my MP3 audiobook files (Command-A) and edit them (Command-
I) to check the "Remenber Position" box on the Options tab. Then I
create a smart playlist (Command-Option-N) with the rules: "Album is
<name of the audio book>" and "Play Count is 0". I check this as one
of the playlists I want sync'd with my Nano. On the Nano 4G (which
announces all its menus and the tracks and playlists I use), I play
the audio book by selecting the name of my smart playlist under the
Playlist menu. As I listen to each track, the files that I finish
drop off the start of the playlist as I finish them (because the play
count updates from 0 to 1 -- the iPod knows that I've listened to
these), The "remember playback" option keeps a bookmark so that
whenever I return to the playlist after pausing my listening to play
music or podcasts I will resume where I left off. Finally, when I
connect my iPod again, all the sections I've listened to can get
automatically cleared off, leaving room for other audio books, since
the conditions for my smart playlist are to only sync tracks which
have not been previously played. (I can reset the play count of any
selected tracks with in iTunes if I want to listen to this again.)
Just an example.
Cheers,
Esther
