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[msnell]

I've come across a very quircky thing I'd like to figure out.

I recently bought an iPod Video (60GB) and I use MC11 to load music on it. When I scan the Artist view of the iPod, certain artists appear out of order with the click wheel. I came to recognize that it is all artists which start with articles (like "the"), except it also adjusts artists which begin with articles from different languages (la, les, los, etc.). This places an artist like "Los Del Mar" under D and "La Bouch" under B.

When I load those same files using iTunes they are found inder L, as I would have expected.

Not a big deal, BUT........

I just bought the Chrysler iPod Integration kit and the way MC loads the music and deals with those articles completely screws up the way you navigate the iPod.

The kit allows you to use the stereo controls to browse and select the content on your iPod. The Fwd & Rew keys let you skip through a list by the first letter of the alphabet - A,B, C, etc. Then you narrow down your choice with the Seek and Scan button to find the selection within that letter - Bangels, Beatles, etc. Pretty slick actually.

The problem is it gets screwed up by the way MC loads the sort data. By having an artist such as "La Bouch" loaded on the iPod, my alphabetic skips goes A, B, then L, M. Missing all those letters when you have 10,000 songs on your iPod makes it hard to get to something in the C-K range.

I only care because I have invested a ton of time in order to make this work and discover where the problem comes from. I brought my vehicle back to the dealer to have the iPod kit re-installed and even swapped my iPod for a new one before I finally thought it might be the way MC is loading the iPod. I tried the same songs with iTunes and it all worked as planned. Although iTunes ignores "The" in the artist sort order, the car kit was alright with that.

For the 40+ tracks in my library which have foreign language articles (la, les, los, de, etc), I simply added an underscore after the article in the Artist name field. "Los Lonely Boys" now becomes "Los_Lonely Boys". This also fixes the problem and I once again load the iPod with MC.

After all of this hassle, I'd like to suggest that this unnecessary "feature" be removed. I'd hate to see anyone else go through the same drama I did here. The Chrysler/Dodge kit may not be the only one that reacts this way to the MC style of alphabetic sorting.

[Matt]

To make sure I understand, the artists are out of order on the iPod itself? (so we don't need a Chrysler hookup unit to test)

Thanks for all the details, and sorry for the hassle.

[msnell]

That is correct. When you view the artists on the iPod they are out of order compared to how they would be ordered if loaded by iTunes. Because the Chrysler hookup expects to see the iTunes sort order, it doesn't behave properly with the order that MC sorts them.

Thanks for taking an interest in this. I'd be quite interested in hearing anything you discover. If I can do anything else to help, please let me know.

[BartMan01]

After all of this hassle, I'd like to suggest that this unnecessary "feature" be removed. I'd hate to see anyone else go through the same drama I did here. The Chrysler/Dodge kit may not be the only one that reacts this way to the MC style of alphabetic sorting.

Instead of removing the sorting, how about making it user configurable like the main Tree & View option.  It would also be nice to indicate what should and should not be considered an article (in the Tree & View sorting option as well).  Personally, it sounds like the interface developer was being lazy, made the incorrect assumption that ONLY iTunes would be used, and is relying on Apple to do the sorting for them.