How can I build a playlist of snippets of songs in my iPhone music library?
September 7, 2012 4:06 AM   Subscribe

iPhone: How can I build a playlist of snippets of songs in my music library?

When I listen to music on my iPhone, I often don't listen to the whole song; instead, I will listen just to one particular verse that I like and skip the the instrumental or chorus portions. Then I might listen to that verse again, or skip to the next. Rather than manually scrubbing through songs to get to the parts I like each time I listen, I'd like to build a library/playlist of my favorite parts of songs. For example:

Song 1: 0:46-1:05
Song 2: 0:23-0:40 and 0:51-1:17
Song 3: 2:10-2:42

I want to be able to skip forward and backward through snippets, rather than being forced to listen to the whole thing sequentially.

There are a bunch of DJ apps for iOS (I tried DJ Mixer Pro), but they don't seem to be optimized for my use case: they have a bunch of stuff I don't need (like fading/mixing/special effects), and seem unwieldy for making what I described above.

I know I could edit the audio files on my computer and create separate files and put them in a playlist, but I'm looking for something less labor intensive, since essentially I just want to create bookmarks in my audio files.

Is there any method/app for doing what I want to do? Either an iOS app or a PC app, as long as I can listen to the final result on my iPhone.
posted by lunchbox to Technology (3 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: In iTunes, select your song, then go Get Info (cmd-I on mac, dunno for PC, I assume ctrl-I). Under the 'Options' tab there are items for start time and stop time.
posted by pompomtom at 4:34 AM on September 7, 2012


(for your 'song 2' example, I presume you'd need two copies of the song)
posted by pompomtom at 4:35 AM on September 7, 2012


Best answer: An extra note: once you set the Start Time and/or Stop Time using iTunes as described by pompomtom, you can choose Advanced menu > Create AAC Version and iTunes will extract that portion of the song into a separate AAC file, which you could then rename (using Get Info) as "(chorus only)" or whatever.

You could use this method to extract different snippets from the same song (set the Start/Stop times then Create AAC Version repeatedly). Or, you could use this if you wanted just a small snippet from a large file in order to save space.

This method may also be more precise, because (annoyingly) sometimes there is a slight difference in the exact Start/Stop times when listening on a computer versus an iOS device when simply relying on the specified Start/Stop times (at least on a PC, dunno about Mac).
posted by drew3d at 9:10 AM on September 7, 2012


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