Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Annoyance against the machine

Does anyone know of a way of getting a file from one section of iTunes ('Music', for example) to another (such as 'Podcasts' or 'Audiobooks')?

Changing the genre after selecting 'Get Info' doesn't seem to make a difference - files will be tagged as 'Podcast' but still show up in 'Music'.

The reason I ask is that I tend to download a fair few spoken word files and these get mixed up with the music ones - causing problems when I try to use the 'Shuffle' function on my iPod. It's fairly annoying having to take the iPod out and skip the track whenever, for example, a radio interview with Richard Dawkins comes on instead of a song. Ideally, I want to somehow classify these files as non-music. But iTunes doesn't seem to have this ability, locking the files into whatever category it sees fit to assign when you first download/import them.

7 comments:

jmb said...

I'll watch the comment section here too to see if any one has an answer.

I tend not to use the shuffle function in my iPod, for the same reason. I'll be listening to music and suddenly a spoken Italian lesson will come on from the podcasts. Since I have 2GB of podcasts and 4GB of music it happens quite often.

So I have quite a few playlists set up for when I don't want to listen to a particular album.

Matt M said...

I'm not holding out much hope. It should be simplicity itself - but both trial and error and extensive googling have turned up nothing.

Alex said...

rats. I was hoping to find the answer as well...

The arrival of a talk on epistemology of God right in the middle of a rockin' set really has a way of killing the mood.

Matt M said...

I think Jmb's playlist idea is the best way forward. Not sure if/how it works on other models, but the nano allows you to select 'shuffle' under settings and then select a playlist to play. It's not quite as straight forward as just selecting 'shuffle' from the main menu, and it's still annoying that I can't move between categories in iTunes, but it might solve your problem.

Turtle said...

Strange. I have no such problems with my iPod nano. Podcasts and music are properly separated.

Don't know why though. Sorry :(

Rev. Dr. Incitatus said...

Why can't you just file all your tunes in a separate playlist and run your shuffle mode off of that? It only means an extra button press...

;)

Matt M said...

Turtle,

Podcasts and music are separate - the problem is that most standalone mp3 files (such as a radio interview I've download, for example) get classified as music and I can't see how to change that.

Rev,

It's the principle of the thing. Why the hell doesn't iTunes allow you to change categories?!

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