“Can you HONESTLY say you’ve read the owner’s manual?”

I have used my iPod shuffle most every day since I’ve had it — probably five years now — in fact, I’ve become totally dependent on it for a sense of companionship — but before last night, I thought you couldn’t fast forward or rewind in a track — that the Forward Arrow could only “Chapter Skip” to the beginning of the next track.  Which is OK for songs, but a real pain when listening to a 60-minute podcast, and then accidentally knock the Forward Arrow button when still only half way through it — and so you have to start back at the beginning, and re-listen to the whole thing to get back to where you were.

Well, last night I finally figured it out — you just have to hold the Forward Arrow DOWN for a couple of seconds, then it skims forward rather than skipping to the next piece.  SO simple.

The owner’s manual is only a one-sided little card with 10 lines of text on it; I saved it on my bulletin board all these years with the intention of studying it one day, but I never did  — I just ASSuMEd my Shuffle was too small to have this "bonus"-type feature.  Or if it did, that maybe it was explained on some larger owner's manual that I had not noticed and threw out with the packaging.

 Also, rather than really looking at that little card, I did a Google Search a couple of years ago, and it did find an answer, but the way it came across to me was “first you have to hold this one button down for five seconds, then you have to tap on another button, and then it will work. “  I always thought I would find that answer again someday when I have time and really figure it out.

So last night on the train, I really didn’t want to go back and re-listen to all of This American Life to find out how this one story turned out… and with  the strength of knowing that what I wanted to do was at least theoretically possible, I looked at the thing carefully, and saw there were only three buttons:  Play, Forward Arrow, Reverse Arrow.  Of the three, it was probably something to do with the Forward Arrow.  I decided to just try holding it down...

PS:  Well, it’s a few days later, and I was about to start listening to my $1 audiobook version of Anna Karenina.  (It turned out to be the same version I had rented  for about $60 on cassettes twenty-five years ago.) But, each section of  the book is seven hours long, and even with my new Fast Forward capability, I didn’t want to be FF’ing through the first five hours if I accidentally knocked a button while jogging.

It occurred to me that if the Shuffle had a FF feature, it stood to reason it would also have a Hold feature — even my old Discman had that.  So, Googled it, and Bam!   “Hold down the play button for 3 seconds and the light will blink yellow.  Hold it down for 3 seconds again to Release Hold.”

Did it, works PERFECT!

PPS: Just checked my Bulletin Board to see if I could find the little Owner’s Manual card to try to confirm that the above information was there all along, but it has kind of gotten buried under similar things (“to look at later”) that were thumb-tacked on after.  So I guess I'll never know.