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.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-28-2005 @ 9:59PM
Yanik Magnan said...
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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6-28-2005 @ 10:29PM
Donald Potter said...
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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6-28-2005 @ 10:50PM
David Chartier said...
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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6-28-2005 @ 11:18PM
Alister said...
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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6-29-2005 @ 1:11AM
Logan said...
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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6-29-2005 @ 3:53AM
Alister said...
Forgot to mention, how does it work with the ipod?
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6-29-2005 @ 8:13AM
fishpatrol said...
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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6-29-2005 @ 8:16AM
Phil Haselden said...
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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6-29-2005 @ 8:17AM
Felipe said...
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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6-29-2005 @ 9:25AM
Jamie Phelps said...
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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6-29-2005 @ 7:17PM
fraser Speirs said...
I posted some screenshots of how all this translates to the iPod: http://www.livejournal.com/~fraserspeirs/904199.html
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6-29-2005 @ 8:42PM
Scott McNulty said...
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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7-01-2005 @ 6:42PM
Leo said...
"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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7-02-2005 @ 11:46PM
Jojo said...
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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7-03-2005 @ 11:43AM
logich said...
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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7-14-2005 @ 6:45AM
yoav freund said...
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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7-14-2005 @ 8:12PM
Fuzz WIlkens said...
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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