Smarter shuffling on your iPod
July 10th, 2006
I love my iPod, but there is one little annoyance that I’ve been looking for a good solution to: the inability to properly configure the Shuffle Songs option on the main menu. When you select this option, the iPod will start playing all of your songs in random order. I suppose that this is quite useful if you listen to only one type of music, but my iPod is crammed full of rock, pop, jazz, classical, and all sorts of other nonsense that I hardly ever listen to. If I’m in the mood for middle of the road rock and pop, then I certainly don’t want 10-minute classical pieces popping up in between.
If you go looking for a solution to this problem, one of the first things you’ll come up with is the Skip when Shuffling option in iTunes. This allows you to mark which songs should be omitted when you’re using the Shuffle Songs option. Bizarrely though, there is no way to apply this setting to multiple files at once. So if you have a couple hundred files or more that you’d like to apply this to… well, you get the picture I hope.
The solution I’ve finally settled on is a little less than perfect, but it works. It involves putting a unique comment into each of the songs that you’d normally like to be skipped when shuffling, then creating a smart playlist to skip just those songs. And here’s how you do it:
Sony Unilink and your iPod
July 4th, 2006
I recently bought a used VW Golf (a 1997 GTI), which still has the original factory-fitted stereo installed (a Sony XR-6559 to be exact). There is a CD shuttle in the boot, but I had been reliably informed by the previous owner that this no longer worked. This was alright with me though, as CDs are, frankly, so passé. What I really wanted to do was hook up my iPod, so I could have all my music available to me while driving.
Some Sony car stereos (such as mine) have a Unilink system, which is used for connecting up auxiliary devices such as CD shuttles. The Unilink system consists of standard RCA (component) inputs (picture 1, below), and a proprietary Unilink input (a round, black plug - pictures 2 and 3). Therefore, to hook up an auxiliary device to your car stereo, you would need to connect it to both the component and Unilink inputs. A bit of a problem for us if we want to hook up our iPod. We’d want to connect the iPod to the component inputs, but what do we do about the Unilink connector?