Hi Esther, Yes, I know about the quicklook feature and use to use that before I discovered VLC. But thanks for bringing to my attention the other ways Quicklook can be used. That sounds cool what you are doing with ITunes and your 4g Nano but I won't be buying one of those any time soon. I have a Victor Stream Reader which I've passed on to my partner and now a voice-Sense and a Milestone along with a bookport and a pac mate so I think I have enough talking devices that have music playing capabilities there smile. Oh and I forgot I have a 60gb IPod around somewhere with Rockbox on it. Oh I also forgot to mention that the other reason I like VLC is because you can specify what actual sound device the player should direct it's music through. If ITunes 8 has finally included this feature, that might give me a reason to look at it again.
David Truong EMail and Messenger: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Skype: blindboxer1967 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Esther Sent: Monday, 22 September 2008 6:17 AM To: General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X by theblind Subject: Leopard's Quick Look feature [was Re: ITunes Alternatives] 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
