On iPhone's iPod, how do you fastforward and rewind song and podcasts?

[kavika411]

Thanks for reading this. My question is hard to explain, but I will do my best.

On regular iPods, it is very easy to fastforward and rewind songs and podcasts; you just click the center button and then scroll forwards or backwards. This is very useful, especially when listening to an hour-plus podcast and you need to move around inside it. However, on the iPhone's iPod, this feature appears absent, at least at first glance. I see that I can push and hold the forward or backward buttons, but that is next to useless when you can't visually see how far forward or backwards you are moving. Plus, it is SLOW.

Does anyone know how to fastforward and rewind more efficiently than this, like the way we did on iPods? Thanks.

[technicolor]

there is a scroll bar at the top of every song that you can just slide your finger across. If you don't see it double tap underneath the song title and it should appear.

[eddietr]

Just click on the album cover and the slider will appear at the top.

[retrovertigo]

They have to fix this... seriously. For hour-plus podcasts, it's absolutely ridiculous that you have a scrollbar that's roughly half the vertical width of the iPhone. Every miniscule tick that the slider moves is 2-3 minutes! When you want to rewind 20 seconds or sp, this is absolutely unacceptable. Holding down the back button is not really much of a solution either, since it only rewinds at about the speed that it plays (that, and it seems to take the iPhone 2-3 seconds to actually realize that you want to rewind and, you know, start rewinding).

Apple did have beta testers working on the iPhone, didn't they? I just don't see how things like this can be overlooked.

[Phil A.]

Holding down the next / previous track buttons either side of the play button starts off slow, but the longer you hold the button down the faster it goes.

[retrovertigo]

Holding down the next / previous track buttons either side of the play button starts off slow, but the longer you hold the button down the faster it goes.

That happens on movies, but for some reason not on my audio podcasts. Like I said, I hold down the rewind button, and it only goes back about as fast as it was playing, no matter how long I hold it.

[jimN]

You know what? Never found this to be a problem, maybe that's why this 'glaring' omission snuck past the Beta testers.

[macmomo]

I listen to shows and long podcasts and the bar is useless. You'll get it to the point in time you want and than take off your finger and it jumps an hour ahead or back. Its fine for 5 min songs.

[Small White Car]

This guy agrees:

http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/11-14_scrubbing-the-iphone-scrubber

[pedroistheman]

seriously . . . the current system works fine for music, but most videos are too long to have such a small range.

[syntaxterror]

As described above, tap on the album to get the slider, now here is the extra info missing from above:

When you now tap the scroll-bar, hold down your finger on it, and move it DOWN, you will see the text above the scroller change from Hi-Speed Scrubbing,Half-Speed Scrubbing,etc.. all the way down to Fine Scrubbing when you are at the bottom of the screen.

So this way you DO have fine control over positioning!

I realize this is a very old thread, but it shows up in Google when trying to find out how to fast forward/backward songs on the iPhone. I found this information useful but not complete, and with above added info it might help more people. :)