Hi Lauren, Welcome to the list and your new Mac. To fast forward and rewind when playing a track in iTunes use Command-Option-Right arrow and Left arrow. I usually hold down the Command and Option keys and tap my arrow keys so I can hear things play. For a list of the various iTunes shortcuts, take a look at "Keyboard Shortcuts" under the "Help" menu on your iTunes menu bar: use VO-M (where "VO" is a shortcut definition that means press the VoiceOver Control and Option keys together with the subsequently listed key or keys -- e.g. simultaneously press the Control, Option, and M keys) to go to the menu bar. Go to the "Help" menu by pressing "H" (or, I use VO-left arrow to keep my fingers on the arrow keys, since "Help" is always the last menu), then arrow down in the "Help" menu to "Keyboard Shortcuts" and press enter. And iTunes Help window will appear listing the keyboard shortcuts. You'll find this shortcut described in the starting section listing playback shortcuts. Read down to learn other helpful shortcuts grouped by category, and close the window with Command-W when you're finished.
If you want to read off the actual time in a track, you can optionally pause the track by pressing space bar, then stop interacting with the songs table and VO-Up arrow until you hear "LCD section" and interact (VO-Shift-Down arrow). VO-Right arrow through the track name and artist to the current time. You can then VO-Right arrow to the remaining time. If you press this with VO-Space you'll toggle this between remaining time and total time. To quickly go back to your track in the songs table, stop interacting with the LCD section (VO- Shift-Up arrow), and use Command-L to get back to the location of your current track. (You can toggle back to play by pressing space bar if you paused your recording.) Another easy way to move to any point in a track is to use the RestartAt AppleScript that recently Lynn asked about. Here's the link to my posted answer: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg15113.html This AppleScript is useful when you want to jump to specific time. However, using the rewind and fast forward shortcuts (Command-Option- Left or Right Arrow keys) you actually sample the track as you move through, so you might prefer that. Podcasts are kept in separate folders by subscription and you'll need to select "Podcasts" under your Library in the sources table of iTunes. You can just VO-Down arrow a few lines from your "Music" library or you can type the first few letter of the name e.g., "p o d", to move to your podcasts playlist. Stop interacting with the songs table and navigate to the songs table (VO-J will jump you to the songs table). The first time you go to podcasts you have subscribed to, the folders will all be "collapsed". To open a particular podcast subscription folder and view the individual episodes, navigate (e.g. VO-Down arrow) to the subscription folder you want (e.g. "Blind Cool Tech") and expand the folder with VO-backslash (where the backslash key is at the far right, below the delete key and above the enter key on an English language keyboard). Users with non-English input keyboards may need to bring up the Commands menu (VO-H twice), and arrow down to "Toggle disclosure triangle" and press enter in order to expand or collapse folders. Once the folders are expanded, you can arrow down to the podcast you want and press enter to start playing. Managing podcasts (including automatically deleting podcasts you have listened to) has changed with each of the last iTunes releases. To set up iTunes to automatically delete podcasts you have listened to, stop interacting with the podcasts songs table (VO-Shift-Up arrow) and navigate (VO-RIght arrow) to the "Settings" button. Press this button with VO-Space. The "Settings" button lets you manage how frequently you check for new episodes (hourly, daily, weekly, or manually), what action you want iTunes to take when new episodes are found to be available (download all episodes, download most recent episode, or do nothing), and what episodes you want to keep (all episodes, all unplayed episodes, or most recent 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 10 episodes). You can set up your choices either by specific podcast subscriptions or you can use default settings for all podcasts. This allows you to specify, for instance, that in general you want iTunes to only keep unplayed episodes, but for a few subscriptions you want to keep all episodes. The "Settings" menu has four pop up buttons for the preference settings described above to cover options for frequency of checking, download action to take, and episodes to keep. The fourth button pop up button tells you that the preferences are set for "All Podcasts" (i.e., these are your "Default" settings) or for a specific subscription that will be listed in alphabetical order following "All Podcasts". If you navigate to the settings button, the podcast you highlighted in the songs table will be selected on the pop up button. If you VO-Right arrow through these options, you might read: 1. Check for new episodes "Every day" pop up button. And below that, "Next check: Tomorrow, 8:15" giving the time iTunes is scheduled to try its next check. 2. Settings for "Blind Cool Tech" pop up button. 3. Use default settings checked check box 4. When new episodes are available: "Download the most recent one" dimmed pop up button 5. Episodes to keep: "Last 2 episodes" dimmed pop up button To set up your default settings, navigate to the second pop up button (following "Settings for") and press it (VO-Space). Use your up arrow to navigate to "All Podcasts" and press enter to select. Then navigate to the pop up buttons that follow "When new episodes are available" and "Episodes to keep", press them (VO-Space), and select your default preference action. I think your default settings are automatically applied to new podcast subscriptions, and that the box to use default settings will automatically be checked, but you can check or uncheck this box using VO-Space. To apply different settings for a specific podcast, select the podcast in the pop up button following "Settings for" either using your up and down arrow keys or by typing the first few letters of the name of the podcast and press enter. Then, VO-Right arrow to the check box to use default settings and make sure it is unchecked. Navigate to the setting you want to change. For example, to keep all episodes, VO-Right arrow past episodes to keep, VO-Space on the pop up button, and set this to "All Episodes" and then navigate to the "OK" button and press it (VO- Space). (I generally just press "Enter" when I want to commit my changes and "Escape" to cancel them instead of using the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons on menus I am familiar with, but you might want to use the buttons.) One final explanation: iTunes will not automatically delete any podcast episode that you manually download because it will assume these podcasts are ones you want to keep. It will mark these "Do not auto delete". So if you subscribe to a podcast, then find an earlier episode of interest that you manually download, or if you manually download an episode because you've been using a laptop and two or three episodes became available since the last check could be made while you were connected to the internet and only the most recent one showed up in your iTunes library -- all these episodes will be marked "Do not auto delete". This puzzles a lot of people, because they'll set up iTunes to only keep unplayed podcasts and some podcasts they've played clearly were not deleted. Furthermore, when they manually delete these episodes, they get downloaded again if they're still available at the podcast feed. If you want such episodes to be automatically managed and deleted, select the podcast in the songs table and use the context menu (VO-Shift-M) to select "Allow auto delete". You can also set this for all episodes of the podcast by navigating to the folder for the podcast subscription and using the context menu for the folder. If you have a mix of manually and automatically downloaded podcasts in the folder you'll see both the options for "Allow auto delete" and "Do not auto delete" in the menu. You can also use the context menu to "Update podcast" and manually check the feed for new episodes. Finally, if you want to search older archived posts in this list, you can go to the secondary archive page at the Mail Archive for this list: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/ This has a nice search facility that lets you search by author, date, and boolean terms. It also lets you quickly read up and down threads using access key combinations like Control-N for next post in thread and Control-P for the previous post in a thread. The access key combinations also work for other browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer or Firefox on Windows), although there are different prefixes (like the Alt-N instead of Control-N for IE -- I think) so Windows users can also use these shortcuts. Here's a link to a post from a few months ago that describes the facility: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg10037.html (TIP: Where to find searchable archives for this list) HTH. Cheers, Esther Lauren Greer wrote: > Hey, I'm a new user as of 3 days ago, and I'm pretty much in love. I > don't think the honeymoon phase of this relationship will ever end, > in fact. The ability to search archives of this group has helped me > immeasurably. > > > I just have a couple questions (for now, heh). Is there a way to > fast-forward through songs with itunes? I can't find a slider, and > holding down on the next button simply moves to the next track. > also, how do you delete episodes of podcasts once you've listened to > them? It was just suddenly downloading and I had no idea where it > was being saved. It's really bad for a person to be outsmarted by > the operating system, right? :) > > > I'm sure these are both really obvious, but my google searching > skills have come up empty. I'd appreciate any help. Thanks a lot! > > > Lauren > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
