iTunes 4.9 Chapters in Depth
Have you heard the news? iTunes 4.9 is out and it supports, of all things, podcasting. This is exciting news, however, the most exciting thing is the smallest touch.Chapters, my friends, are what podcasts have been missing since their inception. Apple has released a tool (currently in beta) that allows you to set marks on a MPEG4 AAC file. When iTunes reaches the time you have decided on it will display a certain picture or textual link in the Album Art box of iTunes.
See some pictures of this in action, and more of my excited ramblings, after the jump.
The first thing you'll notice when you play a podcast with chapters (like Adam Curry's Podfinder, or Apple's New Music Tuesday) is the little icon to the left. It is a book with a cute little bookmark in it, and when you click on it you are presented with all of the chapters in the podcast so you can jump from one point to another.It looks a little something like this:
Pretty cool, huh?
That's not all! Let's say you want to hear about 'Fly With Me,' so you click on chapter one. This brings the audio to the start of chapter one, and the album art displayed to the right. This is where the magic happens. See that link there that is labeled 'Fly With Me'? If you click on it, that will take you to the 'Fly With Me' section of the iTunes Music Store. This is awesome.There is nothing stopping a person from, say, making those links correspond to whatever they are talking about. If you are talking about TUAW you can send your listeners here with a simple click.
Apple, I applaud you.
Now, I have to say that this is only supported in the AAC format, a format that only Apple at the moment supports. However, I think podcast producers will really like this and start adopting the AAC format for their shows.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Yanik Magnan said 9:59PM on 6-28-2005
The problem with this is that not every MP3 player supports M4B (AAC) files. :( Which is why I love Apple's podcast system. :>
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Donald Potter said 10:29PM on 6-28-2005
Another great use for this would be in audiobooks. You could insert photographs, line drawings, maps, etc at the appropriate point in the books narrative.
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David Chartier said 10:50PM on 6-28-2005
AAC is a 10+ year old format that anyone and their grandma can support. Hopefully everyone else will get on the ball sooner or later.
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Logan said 1:11AM on 6-29-2005
Once again... no thanks for the tip? :p
I'm sure someone else could have sent this in as well or you figured it out yourself, it just seems odd that this was time coincident to the time I sent the tip.
No worries, just I appreciate the credit. Hehe.
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Alister said 11:18PM on 6-28-2005
Cool.
This will be good for DJ Mix Albums (Such as Ministry of Sound), where you can have chapters for each song that has been mixed together.
Shame the app is a command line app though :(
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Alister said 3:53AM on 6-29-2005
Forgot to mention, how does it work with the ipod?
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fishpatrol said 8:13AM on 6-29-2005
I'm cool with displaying an image at a set point in an audio track. Nice. Now if I could just rip a CD as a single file and set markers for individual track points. Yes I know there wouldn't be separate files for each song. But I'd be very happy to trade that for having no breaks between tracks.
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Phil Haselden said 8:16AM on 6-29-2005
This is similar to what I have been thinking about lately. However I am not sure I would want this information embedded in the binary file, especially when it precludes other formats such as MP3.
My leanings are more towards writing an extension to RSS 2.0. This post has prompted me to blog what I have been thinking over here: http://phaselden.blogspot.com/
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Felipe said 8:17AM on 6-29-2005
Does the iPod photo (or color) changes the album art when the bookmark changes the picture? My guess is that it doesn't, since it only supports one album art per song.
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Jamie Phelps said 9:25AM on 6-29-2005
I think it could be very exciting as a step toward being more friendly to classical music. Like the comment above said, this would be good for albums you want to join tracks on. For example, operas would benefit from this if you could make Acts and Scenes as well as individual arias and recits into chapters. Cheers to Apple on another step in the right direction for classical music.
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fraser Speirs said 7:17PM on 6-29-2005
I posted some screenshots of how all this translates to the iPod: http://www.livejournal.com/~fraserspeirs/904199.html
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Scott McNulty said 8:42PM on 6-29-2005
So did I fraser. :)
http://www.tuaw.com/2005/06/29/ipod-software-updates-adds-a-slew-of-podcasting-features/
I'm glad to see it works on the monochrome iPods as well though.
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Leo said 6:42PM on 7-01-2005
"This is where the magic happens ... that link there that is labeled 'Fly With Me'? If you click on it..." ---> I tried it and it doesn't work. Is there something not working in iTunes that they're not telling us about? I Googled "Fly With Me", and the podcast works fine, just not from iTunes. What gives?
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Jojo said 11:46PM on 7-02-2005
i have the same problem as Leo... The link wont work + if you search "fly with me" in the podcasts in itunes music store, it wont find anything.... anyone have a solution??
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logich said 11:43AM on 7-03-2005
I think that beyond the podcasting effort, these chapters are finally a good answer to the "Dark Side of the Moon" gapless playback complaint.
Last night I wrote a small applescript for iTunes that will create an XML chapter file from a CD or other track list.
If you are interested, give it a try:
http://www.rosetrace.com/~logan/ipod/exportasxmlchapters.tgz
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yoav freund said 6:45AM on 7-14-2005
What would be really great is if the images that are displayed on the the iPod Photo could also be displayed on a TV connected to the iPod Photo, this way you could actually get a few readable lines of text or a figure in there. I'd love to use that to record lectures. Also, is there a way to see the images in a larger format than tiny icons when playing the audio on iTunes?
Anybody has an idea, please write me to yoav_freund@yahoo.com
Thanks!
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Fuzz WIlkens said 8:12PM on 7-14-2005
CBC Radio 3 just released their music podcasts with chapters today. It seems like they send a version with chapters for Itunes clients and the mp3 version for non-Itunes clients. I just got it and its pretty handy to be able to jump to any song in their podcast. You can get to their podcast in the Itunes Canada directry or at http://www.cbcradio3.com/podcast/
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