OK, this does make sense. I set up a MacBook for someone last summer,
and discovered Front Row when I hit the keyboard sequences. At the
time I thought Front Row did play Audible books -- but that was under
Tiger, and I didn't do a lot of testing. So I assumed my memory of
this was faulty, and certainly the current Front Row interface is
slightly different from what I remembered.
I don't really understand the reason behind some of the more recent
changes. For example, there's no option to use constant bit rate
encoding when ripping audio book CDs in iTunes any more, even though
iTunes uses QuickTime and that is a feature that QuickTime supports.
That vanished with one of the not-so-recent QuickTime version updates
about a year ago. And the only way I can listen to podcasts and
audiobooks speeded up is to use AppleScripts that transfer the
current playback position to QuickTime, then speed up QuickTime
playback, and then transfer the current position back to iTunes when I
stop (and that requires a second AppleScript). And this doesn't work
for Audible playback, as you say, since this is a QuickTime only
solution. (I don't generally mind for audiobooks, but there are some
podcasts that I really want to speed through).
Cheers,
Esther
On Nov 16, 2008, at 6:33 PM, Jacob Schmude wrote:
The reason you can't play Audible books in front row is that
Quicktime does not support them. Front row uses Quicktime as its
backend, just as iTunes does. However, the support for Audible books
is an iTunes-only feature, it does not use Quicktime for this and
Quicktime has no support for it. It's annoying but at least there's
a logical reason for this. This is in contrast to front row in
Tiger, which did use iTunes and not Quicktime as its backend for
music playback. Audible books could be played in Tiger's front row.
On Nov 16, 2008, at 13:23, Esther wrote:
Hi,
Audible access is similarly restricted under Front Row. Although
the titles can be displayed, the actual Audible files can't be
played. However, you can play audiobooks from the iTunes Store
or .m4b titles that you rip from CDs in Front Row. (Try this with
Command-Escape to start up Front Row if you don't have an Apple
Remote. Use arrow keys to move up and down through menu selections,
the return key to make selections, and the Escape key to move back
up through the menu levels). I was originally going to suggest
that people wanting to practice accessing iPod menus (before the
iPod Nano 4G with Spoken Menus came out) try using Front Row's
navigation. But then I found that the Audible audiobooks were
handled differently and wouldn't play.
I'd guess that audiobooks now filed in the Audiobooks part of the
library by changing "Media Kind" from "Music" to "Audiobook" under
the Options tab when you do Get Info (Command-I) might get
displayed in shared libraries, but I haven't tried checking this.
The "Media Kind" option is a new iTunes 8 feature.
Cheers,
Esther
On Nov 16, 2008, at 8:02 AM, Jacob Schmude wrote:
Audio books, i.e. those in Audible or m4b format, are not visible
over a shared library. I've no idea why Apple did this, but the
iTunes help on shared libraries is explicit that these are not
shared.
On Nov 15, 2008, at 23:25, Alex Jurgensen wrote:
Hi,
Odd. I have shared libraries for a long time and never had this
issue. *Alex hits himself on the head*, who of course, mybe not
all you playlists are shared. ITunes eight has a feature for this
in the Sharing pane of Preferences.
Thanks for listening,
Alex,
On 15-Nov-08, at 7:23 PM, Jane Jordan (Gmail) wrote:
I've expanded the Shared Library, and there's no playlist for
Audio Books--that's the weird thing. I know it's there, because
it's visible when I am on the iMac, but I can't seem to get at
it from here. Every other list but that one., Very, very odd.
Good thing I made playlists of the books I listen to most
frequently, I guess ... But there are some books that are stand-
alones and don't belongin a playlist of just one. :)
Jane
