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[Chris Shaw]

OK, bear with me on this... I have about 800 albums by about 500 artists. This means that on my iPod, I have to scroll through the 500 artists, then pick from the 1, 2 or 3 albums they each have. This is strongly unbalanced, and can be quite slow, particularly on the Alpine in-car iPod interface I've ordered. What would be quicker would be to redefine the iPod concept of Artists to Shelves, where I'd have 28 shelves each with about 28 albums on it. This would be much more balanced. So my iPod structure might look something like this:

Artists:
All
Air - Basement
Beastie - Blue
Blur - Chicane
Chris - David
Death - Eminem
Ennio - Freeland
etc.

Under Air - Basement would be
Albums:
All
Air - 1998 - Moon Safari
Air - 1999 - Premiers Symptomes
Air - 2001 - 10,000hz Legend
Air - 2004 - Talkie Walkie
Alpinestars - 2002 - White Noise
Aphex Twin - 1995 - I Care Because You Do
Aphex Twin - 2001 - Drukqs
Aphrodite - 2002 - Aftershock
.....
Badly Drawn Boy 2002 - Have You Fed The Fishes
Basement Jaxx - 2001 - Rooty
Basement Jaxx - 2003 - Kish Kash

This way, to get to any album, I'd only have to pick from two lists of 28. Much quicker. The only downside would that it would be harder to play all the albums by one artist, but how often do you do this?

What do people think of this? As far as I can see, it wouldn't be hard to do. I even put some pseudocode together that would do most of the work, although I haven't coded in a long time so it may not work. Ideally, this should happen on the iPod, but I don't see that happening soon. Is this implementable as a script in MC11 or would it need to happen in the iPod plugin. I had this idea while driving and got quite excited about it, so I'm curious to see what other people think.

Incidentally, I'm still using MC10 but if this is doable in MC11, I'm there in a flash.

[tlongacre]

Instead of doing this by changing the Album names, what about using either -- Genre or Composer. Composer might be your best bet because you may have lots of other reasons for keeping a normal Genre set of categories. But the iPod (at least the 4G iPods) uses the Composer category and I, personally never use that one. If I were looking to do what you are saying, I'd manually populate the Composer field in MC and see if the iPod would pick that up.

[Chris Shaw]

That could work. I'm not sure whether my Alpine head unit understands the Composer field, but I'll check.

[Chris Shaw]

My Alpine head unit doesn't recognise the composer field. How about if the iPod plugin/module listed the fields the iPod understands (Track #, Name, Album, Artist, Genre, Composer as far as I know) and allowed us to enter an expression in each one? Then we could all remap fields as we choose.

[SteveG]

Perhaps in the future.