Hello.

Is there a way you can search Artists by the first letter of their name (like the phonebook display) instead of scrolling thru each one of the 100's of artists in the device rolling the button for minutes?

Any suggestions welcome

 

I think the answer to this is "no," but would be really glad if someone told me I was wrong. I asked this question once, and someone suggested creating play lists by alpha, such as creating a playlist for "A" and adding all artists with "a" names into it, then creating one playlist for "B" and putting all "b" name artists into it.

Its kind of a kludgy solution, and if you have a lot of artists under a particular letter, you still have to scroll too much.

 

The way I did it, which was suggested elsewhere on this forum, is to go into your media handler (iTunes or whatever) and reclassify the Genre field into A - Z. You can select Genre on the Mini head unit, and it's really cut down the **** twirling.

Problem is, anytime you upload songs, you must edit the Genre field from whatever it's automatically listed as.

The only other problem is if you deal with MP3's on multiple computers, you have to do this on each one.

It works fairly well with the constraints imposed by iTunes/iPod, though.

Edit - The good part is, in iTunes you can perform a bulk edit. Select all of your A-bands, right click and select Get Info, Check Genre, then change the genre field to the 'A'. Should take you about...oh...20-26 times doing this. I combined P/Q and W-Z.

 

The real problem here is that the ipod interface sux. Have had many car stereos that had an interface for the iPod, all of them allowed you to scroll to an artist by alpha very easily. The interface in the mini is the worst I have seen.