Checking and unchecking multiple items in iTunes

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Checking and unchecking multiple items in iTunes

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Q: On iTunes, there is a box next to the song title. This is used to determine whether a song is synched or not to an iPod. Is there a way to highlight select a group of songs and check or uncheck en masse instead of one song at a time?

- George

A: You can easily check or uncheck ALL of the displayed items by holding down the CTRL key (Windows) or CMD key (Mac) while clicking on any one of the checkboxes. The checkboxes of ALL of the displayed items will be simultaneously checked or unchecked.

Note that this affects all of the displayed items, and not merely those items that you have highlighted in iTunes. If you want to restrict your selection, you can either use the iTunes Browser to choose a specific Genre, Album or Artist, or filter based on a Search criteria or a playlist.

One other point worth noting: The checkboxes are not used only to determine whether a song is synced to your iPod, but will also affect whether or not a song is played in iTunes. Unchecked tracks will never be played by iTunes unless you specifically select them, so if you have any tracks in a playlist that are unchecked, these tracks will also be skipped when playing back your music from this playlist.

If this is a concern for you, then you may want to consider managing the music on your iPod based on selected playlists, rather than based on checkboxes.

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Comments

1

As a follow on to the answer about “Skip when shuffling” vs. a smart playlist, how can I show which songs have the “Skip when shuffling” flag set? The only solution I’ve found so far was: 1) Create a standard playlist of all songs to be skipped, 2) Create a smart playlist of songs *not* to be skipped, 3) periodically select all songs from both playlists and set the skip flag to the correct value all at once. This wasn’t a problem for the first several hundred songs but as I rip my entire CD collection this has really gotten out of hand. And it updates the music files every time I run the manual update. Is there no way to show the “Skip” value in the the same way you can show the “Kind” or “Bitrate” values? Can I somehow export that data?

Posted by John_B on February 8, 2009 at 11:00 AM (PDT)

2

Regarding the question about slowing down the speed of the song, I’m not sure the method mentioned will work. I think changing the file to Audiobook in Media Kind is not enough to get the file to play at variable speeds. I believe you have to change the file extension name from .m4a to .m4b. There are AppleScripts that will do this for you from Doug’s Applescripts—the Make Bookmarkable script and the Quick Convert script.

When Apple added the ability to change files to Audiobooks within the Get Info window, I was excited because it would mean less work for me to get my files to play at a faster speed. But when I tried it out, on my 4th gen iPod, it didn’t work for me—the files would be bookmarkable like an audiobook, but I wasn’t able to get them to play at different speeds.

If someone has tested this and it does work, please post here to let me know. I’d be more than willing to test it out again to see if something has changed or there was something I missed.

Posted by Plan K on February 9, 2009 at 1:50 PM (PDT)

3

will the batttery for the 4th Gen Ipod photo like this one at amazon:

fit in the 4th gen mono-chrome click wheel.

Posted by tim on February 12, 2009 at 5:31 PM (PDT)

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