Saturday, January 17, 2009

Controlling Playback (Music) - iphone

Once you’re on the Now Playing screen, a few controls await your fingertip—
some obvious and some not so obvious.


Play/Pause (÷/¿) button. The Pause button looks like this ¿ when the
music is playing. If you do pause the music, the button turns into the Play
button (÷).
if you’re wearing the earbuds, pinching the microphone clicker serves the same
purpose: it’s a Play/Pause control.
incidentally, when you plug in headphones, the iPhone’s built-in speaker turns off,
but when you unplug the headphones, your music pauses instead of switching
abruptly back to the speaker. You may have to unlock the iPhone and navigate to
the iPod program to resume playback.
Previous, Next («, »). These buttons work exactly as they do on an
iPod. That is, tap « to skip to the beginning of this song (or, if you’re
already at the beginning, to the previous song). Tap » to skip to the
next song.
if you’re wearing the earbuds, you can pinch the clicker twice to skip to the next
song.
If you hold down one of these buttons instead of tapping, you rewind or
fast-forward. It’s rather cool, actually—you get to hear the music speeding
by as you keep your fi nger down, without turning the singer into a
chipmunk. The rewinding or fast-forwarding accelerates if you keep holding
down the button.

Volume. You can drag the round, white handle of this scroll bar (bottom
of the screen) to adjust the volume—or you can use the volume keys on
the left side of the phone.
Of course, you probably didn’t need a handsome full-color book to tell you
what those basic playback controls are for. But there’s also a trio of secret controls
that don’t appear until you tap anywhere on an empty part of the screen
(for example, on the album cover):

Loop button. If you really love a certain album or playlist, you can command
the iPhone to play it over and over again, beginning to end. Just
tap the Loop button (¶) so it turns blue (‡).
Tap the Loop button a second time to endlessly loop just this song.
a tiny clock icon appears on the blue loop graphic, like this &, to let you know
that you’ve entered this mode. Tap a third time to turn off looping.
Scroll slider. This slider (top of the screen) reveals three useful statistics:
how much of the song you’ve heard, in minutes:seconds format (at the
left end), how much time remains (at the right end), and which slot this
song occupies in the current playlist or album.
To operate the slider, drag the tiny round handle with your fi nger. (Just
tapping directly on the spot you want to hear doesn’t work.)

Shuffle button. Ordinarily, the iPhone plays the songs in an album
sequentially, from beginning to end. But if you love surprises, tap the
fl button so it turns blue. Now you’ll hear the songs on the album in
random order.

To hide the slider, Loop, and Shuffl e buttons, tap an empty part of the
screen once again.
By the way, there’s nothing to stop you from turning on both Shuffl e and
Loop, meaning that you’ll hear the songs on the album played endlessly,
but never in the same order twice.
Did you ever notice the tiny grille (pinholes) at the bottom inside of the iPhone’s
charging cradle? They’re there to let the sound out. That’s right: you can use the
iPhone as a desktop music machine, even while it’s charging. The holes actually
help matters, because the sound bounces off the desktop instead of shooting out
into space away from you. (You can’t listen while you sync, alas.)