Hey, does anyone know if there is a quicker way to skip through your artists or songs while the ipod is connected? instead of scrolling down song by song.. i know there is a down button on the nav screen but that still goes by pages and would be a lot harder while driving.

Thanks

 

For artists, most have found using the playlist or genre trick useful. Just create a playlist or genre for each letter of the alphabet. In other words, all "A" artists in the "A" playlist / genre, "B" artists in the "B" playlist/genre, etc. This goes a long way to making the ipod interface useable.

 

ahh.. i see.. i guess that could work.. but there is no way of doing it otherwise?

 

No. Before I read about that trick, I had become so frustrated with the ipod interface, I actually took my ipod out and bought some 2 gig CF cards to use. Little did I know those had their own issues...... It's really not that bad though. I can easily find any artist I want now, and I have over 500 artists.

 

Turn the *** or wheel on the console. That should help scrolling faster through the list.

 

I usually unplug the iPod, scroll to the Artist/Song and then re-attach. A hassle but it works much faster than manually scrolling through 6000+ songs.

 

the genre thing is the best idea so far

 

I have 24k songs and close to 130gb of music...the genre suggestion is the only way to go.It is actually quite intuitive...make 27 different genres (A-Z and #) The interface then puts the songs into artists and albums and is pretty quick to find stuff.

 

Ok, I'm an idiot, but what's the 27th genre?

 

For artists that fall into either a number or misc. genre (50 Cent, 311..etc)

 

Thanks, man.

 

Actually, I think this would only work with Genre. I tried the Playlist route, creating a smart playlist for the first letter of the Artist (Artists A - C, Artists D - F, etc.). But when you select one of those Playlists, you get all the songs by the artists in that playlist -- which of course is huge. I was hoping for the Artists first, but I guess that's not how the interface works. Sometimes I want to hear U2, and I get carpal tunnel twisting that wheel to get down to the bottom of the Artist list.

And my problem with using Genre is that I use the actual Genre (e.g., Jazz, R&B) to create other smart Playlists.

Please let me know if I'm missing something, like some what to more quickly scroll through a list, or "page down" a list.

 

I just saw another thread on this topic, which concurred with my Playlist assessment. However, I solved my smart playlist issue by using the Grouping field as the genre, and changing the smart playlist logic to look at that field instead of Genre. (The default genres in iTunes are usually not what I want anyway.) Then, I changed the Genre to my Artist groupings. It took awhile, but now I got what I want.

So, thanks for the suggestion.

 

If you rather go to the artist directly, I found out that if you set the "Composer" in itunes to the corresponding artist's letter (A, B, C etc), you will achieve the same results as the genre mode.

Example, for Alice in Chains, set the composer to "A" then on the nav go to composer section when in ipod mode and pick "A" It will then list all the artists starting with "A" You can then pick the artist and album.

 

How is this different from the Genre work around? It sounds like it works exactly the same way. Is it just a matter of being able to preserve the original genres by doing it that way?