MacMost Now 385: Playing Music on Your iPad with the iPod App

To play music on your iPad, use the iPod App. It gives you access to all the music, audiobooks and podcasts you have synced from iTunes. The iPad version of the iPod app lets you create playlists as well.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.On todays episode lets take a look at the iPod app for the iPad. So the app you use on the iPad to play music is called iPod. It's the same thing thats on the iPhone. You touch the iPod app and it launches an app that shows all of your different music, video, podcasts, all sorts of things that you would normally find in itunes on your Mac or on your iPod in the main interface. Ok so to get into the iPod app, tap it right there. It's usually in the down in the dock portion of your homescreen, and it brings up your music library first. You can scroll through this. You can also sort through them by songs like this or artist, and it will group them together by artist, like that. You can see the artist. You can go by albums. It will give you pictures cut using genres. To play a song you already have one selected screen but you can just tap there and it will start playing. you cant hear it right here, but you can drop to another one like that, and it will bring up the album artwork. Tap on the album artwork and it gives you more controls, including looping control, shuffling controls,create a genius playlist from this track. You can also adjust the volume here. You can jump around in the song itself. You can bring up list of tracks on the album, and it will also display any information you've got in the notes portion of itunes. So if you store song lyrics in there you will see them there as well. In the main interface you can also go through podcasts, and go through all the different podcasts you've got and choose an episode, and you can play it. If its a video podcast the interesting thing is that it jumps to the videos app it doesn't stay in the iPod app. It is very confusing because when you finish watching the video your still in the videos app and you don't get back to this screen. One of the cool things that you can do is create your own playlist, and its not just an on the go playlist. You can create a real play list with a name and once you've got it you can go through this special interface here and add songs to the playlist by pressing the plus sign here to the right, and you can add a whole bunch of different songs just some random things, and tap done. You can sort your music in all different ways while your doing that. So you get this here and you can hit done and have that playlist you can add more songs. You can use these here in the ends to drag songs in order, and you sync it back to a Mac I found they will play here and sync back just as normal. so you can go edit , done. We can jump to another playlist thats created. Edit that one. Add songs to it, it jumps back to the list. Search function is also very useful you can for things by song name or artist, or both. You come up with a list here, and you can jump around these different categories. You can play these just like they are part of your music collection. It's almost like creating a very quick playlist cus you can just play all these other found. You can tap shuffle and it will shuffle all these different found. So you can just search for a genre or an artist. So if you just wanted to search for say Miles Davis, it will come up with all the Miles Dais songs. Press play and you can just play them all with out you having to create a custom playlist.
Now like the iPod and iPod touch when a song is playing like it is right now you dont have to return to the iPod app to pause it or stop the song. You can just double tap the home button, and if you have this set in your preferences which is a default. It comes with this mini iPod control. You can quickly bring up the iPod app or you could pause or go to the previous song or the next song. 
So the iPod app provides a very nice interface for playing back your music. I particularly like that you can create real playlists and sync them back to your Mac. I really wish they would have incorporated the visualizer. Thats the feature of itunes for Mac and Windows that shows all sorts of weird special effects as music is being played. Seems like the iPad screen is perfect for that and they already trying to push it kind off as this picture frame where when your not using your iPad you kind of put it somewhere where it looks pretty. So why not actually have it play the visualizer while your playing music as well. so its a decent app and its pretty much what you would expect. Hopefully they can add some more features to it in the future since the iPad is powerful enough to handle them. Hope you like this look at iPod for iPad. Till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 5 Responses to “MacMost Now 385: Playing Music on Your iPad with the iPod App”

Harry

15 years ago

This videos quality isn't very good, is it just my iMac or is it the video?

Gary Rosenzweig

Depend on your expectations. You can't get a video feed from the iPad, so the only way to get video is to film the screen with a camera. But I did that with HD.

Charles Breed

13 years ago

Haven't been able to use it!

Abdullah

12 years ago

I recently brought an ipad2 and when I searched for the iPod app on it but it is not there please help me!how to get it!

The "iPod" app is now called the "Music" app. It was renamed in iOS 5.

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MacMost Now 385: Playing Music on Your iPad with the iPod App

Comments: 5 Responses to “MacMost Now 385: Playing Music on Your iPad with the iPod App”

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