Over at MacInTouch, Paul Ingraham has a poser. He’d like to play his iPod shuffle through the internal speakers of his wife’s iBook. The hitch is that the shuffle isn’t associated with that iBook and when it’s plugged into the computer, iTunes offers the options to either replace the shuffle library with the contents of the iBook’s iTunes library or not. Choosing the “not” option causes the shuffle to disappear from iTunes, making it impossible to play the iPod through iTunes and out the computer’s speakers, as you can with other iPods set to manual mode.
The trick to making this work on a Mac is employing a different application to play the songs on the shuffle. If you’ve read through many of these entries you know that I’m keen on Whitney Young’s free Senuti. Not only can it copy songs from an iPod to a computer, it can solve this problem as well. It works like this:
Download Senuti. Plug the shuffle into the foreign computer (and by “foreign” I mean a computer it isn’t linked with). iTunes will open and display the message below:
If I may interrupt the narrative for a moment, I’d like to offer a bit of advice that may serve you well in this life’s journey: You needn’t act on something just because it’s in another entity’s interest that you do so.
With this advice in mind, ignore the warning and leave the dialog box right where it is without clicking Yes or No.
Fire up Senuti and you’ll notice that its Source pane contains two entries— Library and iTunes . Click Library and you’ll see a list of the tunes on the shuffle. Click Senuti’s Play button to play the songs on the iPod through the computer’s speakers. If you don’t care for the order the tracks are in, rearrange them by clicking on one of the column headings—Album, for example, if you want to hear all the songs from a particular album.