I think all of us with a lot of music agree the iPod interface sucks. How do you organize your iPod so you don't have scroll for days just to get mid way through the alphabet?

 

This has been discussed in many many many threads Search the forum and you will see what others do.

BUT in the mean time.

There is not much you can do. The iPod sorts music by Artist, Genre, Album and the is what the MINI picks up on so there really is no way to change that.

Now if you have the iPod set for Disk Usage and not attaching with the MINI 'Y-Cable" then you can arrange the music by Folder but then you still have the SAME problem there is a lot of scrolling to do to get to the music.

Set it up by Genre folders the Artist folder then album. well i might as well use the genre selections under the iPod standard funciton. But guess what it is still just as much scrolling and selecting.

The only thing i can see is if MINI added a alphabet type list i.e. A,B,C,D, that would help out greatly. And if they also allowed rollover scrolling I.E. fom z to a and a back to z.

 

Suggestion: Create several playlists of 2-3 dozen songs that you like to hear. Then set the Ipod to playlist mode. You'll have less scrolling to do to cue up your pre-selected groupings.

 

yea, that's what i'm thinking. i dont' understand having the a-z on the phone book but not on the ipod...most people have more music than phone contacts i'd think....

does anyone think there is even a remote possibility that they'd add a-z on the ipod interface? should just be a software update right?

 

There are many people here that have over 1000 contacts and some have complained about the bluetooth phone book limitations. Now i only have about 80-90 contacts but have over 68,000 songs, eventhe larges iPod can't handle that.

Very doubtfull as that is not how the iPod works and as far as i know there are not external devices for controling the iPod that do an a-z menu. I am not sure if the iPod programing could handle that.

 

Create an "A" playlist, then a "B" playlist...

There is a lot you can do with playlists. Organize your music the way you want it. Don't wait for Apple to organize it for you.

 

I agree no A-Z listing is annoying. But like everyone else said so far, just make some good playlists.

 

I tried that a few months ago, but it didn't help for me. The MINI interface will not recognize nested folders in the Playlists directory.

I'm from the old school where you bought an album, and listen to the entire thing, not just random songs (though I do that occasionally as well). So I wanted to come up with a "fix" for the lack of simple A-B-C navigation capabilities through my artists.

My goal was to easily navigate to a given artist, then see all the albums from said artist and choose which one to play...without having to twist the little gray **** a few hundred times!

Smart playlists seem to base the display by song, not by album. Same for regular playlists...once you move an album into a playlist, the name of the album disappears. So I hit upon the idea of creating a playlist folder labeled "A Artists, B-artists, etc. Into eahc of those I would created another folder for the name of each group that I own that begins with that letter...then create smart playlists within each artist folder for every album that I want to list. Tedious yes, but well worth it if it'd work!

It works in the iTunes interface...but then when you connect to the MINI, all you get is the first-level folder ("A Artists") and all the songs listed within it, with no further hierarchical organization.

So my frustration is...if the iPod and iTunes can do it...why didn't BMW program the MINI interface in that same way?

If you've come up with a way to accomplish my goals, I'm all ears!

 

??? The MINI interface flattens out the list, so it won't show them nested, but you should still end up with an A playlist and B playlist etc.

If I want a bunch of playlists to show up in a group I name them with an extra character at the beginning which gets sorted to the top. '!' works well, so if you had playlists !A, !B, !C etc you should get a pretty fair approximation.

 

Old school? I was using reel-to-reel tape when I was in college.

Playlists sort in the same way you have them sorted in iTunes. I think you need to learn a little more about using iTunes.

Not sure I understand your complaint about subfolders. The folder structure is irrelevant with playlists.

 

It's not iTunes that I'm having the problem with..it's the MINI interface. Maybe you need to learn more about it!
The "irrelevancy" (at least to the MINI interface) of subfolders in playlists is precisely the problem. iTunes does not consider them irrelevant, as I can create nested folders within a Playlist folder.. However, the MINI will not properly display those.

My goal was to be be able to easily navigate to any artist I choose, then view the albums by that artist and then select and play an entire album. This can be done without using playlists in the MINI, by hitting the "Artist" button and the turning the gray **** seeming thousands of times to get through the alphabet. My goal was to trick it into providing me with an A-B-C capability like the phonebook for a Bluetooth phone. So the workaround proposed was to use playlists.

iTunes allows the creation of nested folders in iTunes on the PC, and those same nested playlists are listed on the iPod (a brand new 120GB Classic). Sop I created an "A Artists" folder, then within it a folder labeled "AC/DC", a folder labeled "Aerosmith", etc. Then within the "AC/DC" folder I created playlists based on the various AC/DC albums I own. A tedious process, but again, one that I was willing to undergo if it would work.

However when connected to the MINI, the main playlist folders are there (A, B, C, etc), but then within that, the nested folders have disappeared, and all songs by any artist beginning with A are in the A folder. So all AC/DC songs, all Aerosmith, Alan Parsons, etc, are in the folder labeled "A Artists" with no way of selecting by album. The songs are in the same ORDER of the playlists, but the playlists themselves have disappeared, along with any ability to easily select a particular AC/DC album.

So the MINI recognizes the parent playlist folder, but will not recognize any child folders within in it.

FRUSTRATING!

 

Obviously as suggested in post #2 no one searched the forums.

What blackjackmark has stated about flattened play lists has been written about before at least twice.

Again for Balckjackmark do the following.

Set you iPod for "Disc Usage" then "DO NOT" us the Mini "Y-Cable" This should allow you to see the music in folders just as you would in "Windows Explorer".

A>A Artist>Album>Tracks
B>B Artist>Ablum> Tracks

There are still problems with doing it this way.
1. Very slow to load
2. Limitation of the number of tracks indexed. You will be limited to less than 4000 tracks probably as you have more than 5 mp3tags set for each track if you imported the songs with iTunes
3. Any purchased music thru iTunes will not be able to be played as it has DRM attached to it an the iPod is not decoding the music.

 

BlackJackMark,

I have an '09 (not an '08), so not sure if this is entirely applicable. I ditched the iPod and went with the USB memory stick. The MINI stereo reads the subfolders in "DIR" mode, and you can organize music by Artist then Album. Not perfect, but better than the iPod. Also you can leave the stick in the car without fear of it getting ripped off (i.e., it is less conspicuous).