You will need to use your File Management skills a bit, but listening to music on your Kindle can be very nice indeed, and certainly worth connecting your Kindle to your computer via the USB cable that came with it to transfer a few files. If you don't already have an mp3 player, look no more... Your Kindle can do double duty!
The Kindle... not just for reading with your eyes
I love audio books. There was a time when my eyes had gotten so bad, my reading ability was pretty much gone. I was heartbroken at first. I couldn't stand the thought of not being able to read again. I tried a few audiobooks and at first, just couldn't enjoy them.... short attention span, easily distracted, and felt nailed to a chair when I tried to listen to a book. I eventually fell in love with them when I discovered I could combine a 3 mile health walk with a great book. It was amazing! There is nothing that can compare with having some of the Mark Twain classics read to you by a real Southerner... or a horror novel read to you by the author himself (Stephen King).
Well if you are going on a trip and will have your Kindle close by, it might be a great time for you to check out Audible.com and sample a few audio books yourself. Your Kindle will handle Audible files just fine. There is even a special folder on your Kindle for Audible files. You just need to download them and transfer them to that folder on your Kindle via the USB cable that came with it.
Other Music Files:
- You can purchase music from Amazon.com one song at a time (in an mp3 file) or an entire album of mp3 files.
- You may even have friends who have amazing music collections (mp3 files) and don't mind sharing.
- You can take your personal CD collection and "rip" songs from each CD and save them as mp3 files for you to use on your Kindle or mp3 player. My favorite software for this sort of thing is from Acoustica.com. MP3 CD Burner is one of my favorite applications for music files. My husband has fallen in love with it too, and has combined hundreds of songs from various CDs of ours into one cd. We use these MP3 CDs when we go on road trips. The newer CD players will play mp3 cds, and the neat thing is you can get hundreds of mp3 files on a recordable cd, but only a handful of traditional music files will fit on the old fashioned type cd.
- You can put your mp3 files right into the Music folder on your Kindle
- Listen to your favorite podcast mp3 files by transferring them to the Music folder on your Kindle.
- Plug in a headset (or one of those teenie external speakers that are available all over) and you are ready!
- To begin listening to your files in the Music folder, hold down the ALT key and press the spacebar on your keyboard to start playing or stop. Press the F key to skip to the next track.
- Special Note: If you use the Audible folder rather than the Music folder for your mp3 files (especially if they are audio book files not necessarily from Audible.com), you will have the ability to fast forward, rewind, etc with a little control panel at the bottom of the screen that will appear when you select any of these files to play. Any mp3 or audible book files you put in the Audible folder will also appear on your home screen, listed by file names with the word audio to the left of the file name. To play an audio file from this folder, toggle the 5-way switch to the file name until it is underlined, then press in on the 5-way to make it happen. I don't know why you don't have that ability in the regular music folder, or why anyone would want to use the music folder when the Audible folder has so many more features.
- Music file types the Kindle can handle are .mp3. You can get them just about anywhere, including Amazon.
- Connect your Kindle to your computer with the USB cable
- Mac - When the Kindle icon appears on your desktop, double click it to see the folders inside.
- PC - When the little popup box appears asking what you want to do with what you just plugged into your computer, choose view files using Windows Explorer
- Drag the files to the audible or music folder. They won't do you a bit of good anywhere else.
- Disconnect your Kindle and enjoy! Be sure to use the Safely remove option for the PC or drag the Kindle icon to the trash if you have a Mac before you disconnect the usb cable. If you don't know how to safely remove your Kindle, do a search of this blog for a quick primer.
