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[Nolonemo]

I thought I had read that in MC 11 pane view of playlists was possible, i.e., that you could view playlists with a view like the Library view, where you have columns with, for example, genre, artist and album at the top of the window and a bottom window showing the tracks of whatever has been selected in the columns.  I can't see how to do this, however.

Such a feature would be very helpful to me, as one of my primary uses for MC is to transfer and manage music on my handheld (Creative Zen).  To do that, I drag the music I want on the Zen into a Zen playlist, and sync.  The problem with MC 10 is that if I want to see what's on the Zen the view I have is that of the standard playlist view or the handheld view, i.e., every track is displayed.  That makes it really hard to get an overview of what's on the player, since I can't just see a list of albums, and leads to duplicate albums being dragged to the playlist, etc.  Whereas with the pane scheme (as in the present Library view), you could get a quick overview of what artists in a genre were on the player, or what albums by a certain artist were on the player.

Even modifying the current playlist view scheme so you could collapse the track list into albums instead of separate tracks (those who have Zens will know what I'm talking about) would be a great help.
Thanks

Nolo

[SteveG]

Even modifying the current playlist view scheme so you could collapse the track list into albums instead of separate tracks (those who have Zens will know what I'm talking about) would be a great help.

Are you asking for the ability to collapse a playlist on Zen that you are viewing from within  MC from a listing of tracks to a listing of Albums?

Why not use MC to figure out and configure what you want on Zen and then after a sync rely on the fact that what you synched is on the Zen (e.g. create a playlist group for Zen and then add and remove playists to it)?  Are you playlists dynamic and you want to see what actually ended up on the Zen?

Steve

[Nolonemo]

Are you asking for the ability to collapse a playlist on Zen that you are viewing from within  MC from a listing of tracks to a listing of Albums?

No, since I use MC to transfer files to the Zen by dragging them to a Zen playlist in MC and then syncing, the information is already in MC, and I use the MC Zen playlist to see what's on the Zen..

What I would be able to do is to see the contents of that MC playlist  (or any MC playlist for that matter) in the same way that I can look at my entire music library, i.e. with column panes for fields above the bottom pane with the tracks, and the ability to "drill down" into what's shown in the columns by clicking on an item.  (Ie, I have my Library view set up with columns for genre/artist/album, and when I click on "Blues" only artists in that genre show up in the artists column, with only blues albums shown in the album column, and if I then click on John Mayall, only Mayall albums show up in the albums column, and so on.)

So, I'd like to be able to do the same thing in playlist view to get a quick view of all the blues artists or blues ablums that are in the MC Zen playlist.  Right now, because in the playlist view scheme all tracks are displayed, that's hard to do.  So if I want to look at the MC Zen playlist to check what's on there (when getting ready to add or remove albums), instead of being able to see a list of 30 blues albums, which is the information I really want, and which nicely fits on the screen, once I scroll down to the blues part of the playlist (having sorted by album within artist within genre by clicking on the column heads) I still have to sort through a list of 300 tracks (though they are sorted by albums) to cull the information I want.

Hope this clarifies things.  Thanks for your response.

Nolo

[crowfan]

Nolonemo,

This doesn't really answer your question, it provides a work-around. But I thought it might be helpful to you. I have an iPod, and this is how I manage syncing to it.

I created a library field called "iPod." Then, I created a view scheme with the Artist/Album/iPod fields visible in the panes (and I restrict it to show only mp3 and AAC). Then I enter Tagging Mode, and tag the songs that I want on my iPod with a value of "Yes" in the iPod field.

Then I created a Smartlist that has one rule: iPod = Yes. When I sync, I sync this smartlist.

This would achieve what you want, in the sense that you could then use the view scheme to browse what is on your Zen. You could even create a second view scheme, identical to the first, but that also specifies Zen = Yes, and then shows Genre/Artist/Album in the panes, so you could see only what is on the Zen. You could then use the first view scheme to manage what you want synced, and use the second one just to see what has been synced.

Hope I explained this clearly enough. It's not exactly what you were looking for but I thought it may help.

crow

[Nolonemo]

Crowfan, that's very clever!  Plus, there's another advantage to your scheme, which is that you control what's in the playlist not by dragging or deleting but by changing a tag (which could be done in batches).  But let me make sure I understand what you've done (I'm at work so I can't fire up MC).  And, if you set up the view scheme right, you can go into a genre or artist and toggle between what's on the portable and what's not by clicking the appropriate category in the pane (see next paragraph)

Let me make sure I understand what you're saying correctly:

I would create a custom "Zen" tag field, select what I want in MC and make the field "yes" using a mass tag edit.

Then I would create a library view scheme with four column panes: Zen/Genre/Artist/Album.  The zen column should show three entries, "all," "yes" and "unassigned."  If I click on "yes", then the 3 panes to the right will show only what's on the Zen; if I click on "unassigned," the three panes to the right will show only what's not on the Zen.  

Anything showing with "unassigned" clicked that I want to add to the Zen, I would select and do a tag edit to change the Zen tag to "yes".  Conversely, anything showing with "yes" clicked that I want to remove from the Zen, I select and tag edit to clear the yes field.  Then all I need to do is to sync the "Zen = yes" smartlist I've created.

Like I said, very slick!  Thanks.  Actually, this is even better than what I was asking about because of the ability to toggle between Zen and non-Zen (or, in your case iPod and non-iPod)

[crowfan]

Yup, that's pretty much it.  It works well for me. Hope it works as well for you!

 

crow

[Nolonemo]

Yup, that's pretty much it.  It works well for me. Hope it works as well for you!

 

crow

Dang!  I am sooo excited!