Before you can listen to your music you need to include it in the Library's Music media directory as explained in the previous page. There is no sample music supplied with SpeakOn.
Let's assume that you have included a folder containing a music file called 'sample.mp3'. You can play it by doing the following
The Music task should be running. To find an audio file to play, you need to move the focus to the Library control if you are not already there. To do that, press the 'Focus' [Tab] (3) key.
Press the 'Left' [left arrow] (4) key a few times until you hear a beep and a message indicating that you are at the top level (level 0) of the tree. The focus is on the Music media directory. Press the 'Right' [right arrow] (6) key and you are placed at the first (and in this example, the only) media item which is the audio file you placed above, 'sample.mp3'. To start playing this file, press the 'Select' [Enter] (5) key. The focus moves automatically to the Player control. The audio file starts to play. To stop the file playing, press the 'Select' key again.
The audio file presented to the Player is a collection which in the context of music is called a playlist and this term will be used from now on in the context of music. In the case of a single file the playlist contains only a single track.
With the 'Left' and 'Right' keys, you can select a navigation unit. There are five available units: Media, 5 minutes, 1 minute, 15 seconds and 5 seconds.
With the 'Up' and 'Down' keys, navigate in increments of the navigation unit selected.
The 'Media' unit allows you to choose between tracks in a playlist where there is more than one track in the playlist. With the 5 minutes, 1 minute, 15 seconds and 5 seconds navigation units, you can jump up or down these time increments within a track in the playlist. You can do this after playing has stopped or during playing.
If you have more than one audio file in the Library, to select another file, press the 'Focus' key to switch back to the Library control where you can navigate between directories and files.
In addition to single music files, SpeakOn also recognizes a number of playlist formats, and you can play these playlists in exactly the same way as a single audio file.
A more realistic scenario than the example above is where you would add a folder with perhaps the following structure:
Artist > Album > Tracks
When you navigate the Library, SpeakOn will announce the message 'Playable directory' for any directory that contains either audio files or other sub-directories that in turn contain audio files. So for the example above, if you want to listen to the complete album, simply select it and SpeakOn will generate a temporary playlist with the name of the directory (in this case the album) you selected. Similarily, if you select an artist directory, SpeakOn will generate a temporary playlist with the name of the artist containing all of the tracks belonging to that artist and start to play the first track.
When you play a directory, the order of tracks in the temporary playlist is determined by the alphabetical order of the track names. So if you want to preserve the original order of the tracks in the album, make sure that you identify the order during the ripping process by including the track number first in the track name as follows:
01-Track name 1
02-Track name 2
etc
The above naming convention is usually the default in ripping programs such as CDex.
If you end the Music task, when you start it again, the Player will try to load the first track in the playlist and start to play it from the beginning.
Depending on the type of media played, other play options may be available and these can be found in the Play sub-menu of the Main menu. For example, if you play music, the options available are Shuffle, Sort (tracks) by name, Repeat (the whole playlist), and Speak track information during play.
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