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Five Useful Tips for iPod

Are you a iPod fan? Do you want to make full use of your iPod? Here we list five useful tips for iPod and you may have a try.

Tip 1. Use Your iPod to Give Presentations

You don't have to haul your notebook PC around the country anymore; just load your presentation to your iPod, connect the iPod to a projector, and start presenting. The trick here is that your iPod can display any JPG file—including presentation slides converted to JPG format—and not just photographs in JPG format.

What you want to do, then, is convert the slides in your presentation into a series of JPG images. That is, each slide becomes a separate JPG file. You should be able to do this from within your presentation program, or by using a separate screen capture program and capturing each slide as a JPG file. Store the resulting JPG files in a single folder on your PC's hard disk, then sync that photo folder to your iPod.

Tip 2. Work Around Copyright Restrictions

Apple limits how you can use the music it lets you download. For example, you can play a song on only five PCs, and you can't play it on any music player except an iPod. This is all accomplished by means of digital rights management (DRM) technology. DRM imposes use restrictions demanded by the track's copyright holder. These copyright restrictions make your downloaded tracks less portable than they might otherwise be.

The key is to burn the protected track to CD and then rip it back to your computer in MP3 format. When you burn the track to CD, the encrypted DRM wrapper is removed as the file is converted from the AAC digital file format to the CD Audio format used on compact discs. Then when you rip the track from CD back to your hard drive, there's no DRM encryption to worry about—and you can play or burn the track however you like.

Tip 3. Use Your iPod to Store Computer Files

Your iPod is built around either a small hard disk drive or flash memory—the same sorts of storage media used by your computer and other devices to store digital data.

Your iPod can be used as a portable storage device, much like a USB flash drive or external hard disk. All you have to do is configure your iPod for this type of use, or install third-party software to do this management for you. Then you can move and copy any type of file to and from your iPod. (And your iPod is a great device for taking data with you between home and office, or while you're traveling.)

To configure your iPod for data storage, connect your iPod to your computer and then open the iTunes software. In the Source pane, select your iPod and then select the Summary tab. Check the Enable Disk Use option, and click the Apply button.

Tip 4. Find and Delete Duplicate Tracks

After you've used iTunes for a while, you're bound to end up with at least a few duplicate tracks—songs you've inadvertently burned or downloaded more than once. This isn't a big deal when you have a large hard disk, but it is a problem when you're working with the limited storage space on an iPod shuffle or nano. For this reason, it pays to periodically go through your library and delete those duplicate tracks, freeing up space for newer music.

To identify duplicate tracks in your iTunes library, select View > Show Duplicates. iTunes will display all tracks that share the same name, in alphabetical order. Examine each of the duplicate tracks, and delete one or more instances as necessary.

Keep in mind, however, that just because a track has the same name as another track doesn't mean it's a duplicate. Sometimes you'll have the same song from different artists, or from the same artist on different albums. So don't automatically delete a track that looks like a second copy; take your time to determine whether it really is a duplicate before you hit that Delete key.

Tip 5. Create Smart Playlists

To create a standard playlist, all you have to do is select File > New Playlist to create a new "untitled playlist" item in the Playlists section of the Source pane. Double-click this item and enter a title for the playlist; then select Music in the Library section of the Source pane. Select the songs you want to add to the playlist, and then drag them onto the name of the playlist in the Source pane. Voilà! You now have a playlist of the songs you selected.

Even easier is a Smart Playlist, which automatically creates a playlist based on criteria you select. For example, you might want to create a playlist of your favorite soul singers, or music released in a given year, or even dance tracks at a specific tempo. All you have to do is define the rules, and iTunes will find the matching tracks and use them to create a new playlist.

To create a Smart Playlist, select File > New Smart Playlist. When the Smart Playlist dialog box appears, define a new rule that follows the form field > matches > keyword. Pull down the first list box to define the field (Album, Artist, Genre, and so on); pull down the second list box to define the match (contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, and so forth); then enter one or more keywords into the final text box. For example, to include all songs by Frank Sinatra, select Artist > contains > Frank Sinatra.

Hope these five useful tips for iPod can help you.

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