Esther, I'm one hell of a scrubber now let me tell ya. I can scrub
with the best of them. Yeah, scrub a dub dub.
On Nov 15, 2008, at 5:29 PM, Esther wrote:
Hi,
Yes, the way Scott H. describes (listening for the track title
announcement after pressing the center of the wheel) is the best way
to determine when you can enter scrub mode for audio podcasts,
audiobooks, and music tracks. In general, the number of presses to
access different modes can depend on options you have switched on --
for example, for music tracks if you have "Genius Playlists"
switched on you'll get an additional mode added in. For video
podcasts you don't hear the track title announced after pressing the
center button twice to enter scrubbing mode.
The other thing is: the rate at which you scrub determines how fast
you move through the file. I tried an ABC Radio National podcast
that is 35 minutes long, and the fastest I could advance was 7 or 8
circles around the wheel to move from the beginning to the end of
the show. If I slowed down, it could take 24 circles to scrub
through the same amount. One reason there isn't an easy calibration
of this is that as you continue to scrub, you accelerate in the rate
at which you move through the file, so it doesn't scale up in terms
of the amount of time it takes to scrub through a longer audiobook
file. The actual scrub rate you'll get is very individual, and
depends on your particular finger action as well as how long the
file is. I just find the Nano 4G scrubbing for audiobook tracks
really slow compared to the first and second generation Nanos. My
guess is that now Apple is tuning this to television shows and short
music videos, with typical times under 1 hour, where on earlier
iPods the long tracks were audio book tracks at least 5 hours long.
Since those earlier iPods were only set up for podcasts, audio
books, and photo libraries, the scrub rate was probably set up to
complement audio book lengths and not television show episodes.
Pure speculation on my part, though. If you're using audiobooks
from Audible or iTunes, you can probably navigate by chapter
markers. Some software programs (Audiobook Builder and earlier Join
Together and Chapterize AppleScripts) let you insert chapter markers.
Cheers,
Esther
