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[olarte]

PLEASE report Coverflow\Compilation Bugs to APPLE.  The more people that do that MAYBE they'll fix this in a timely manner. until then Coverflow is useless.

Also, I hope thes bugs don't throw a kink into MC's support for the Ipod Classic at least in regards to compilations.

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Please verify and report the following bugs to Apple at

http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html

MAYBE if enough people report these glaring bugs, they might actually fix them. for now Coverflow becomes useless if you have a decent amount of compilations.


1. Coverflow shows multiple covers for compilation albums since it sorts by artist.

2. Compilations show up ok under compilations, BUT the artists still show up under artist, and they should not if they are part of a compilation. if set correctly it eliminates tons of artist with one or two tracks only.

3. Missing sorting options for Coverflow.

I CANNOT believe that these two bugs, and the omission of coverflow options are on the new Ipods.

It makes me wonder what else is broken!

Also, the coverflow itself and scrolling through albums seems very sluggish and that's with small sample of cds... Geez!

[lalittle]

I CANNOT believe that these two bugs, and the omission of coverflow options are on the new Ipods.

Given the history, it's "amazing" to me but definitely not "surprising."  Apple always puts form over function -- it's VASTLY more important for them to offer fancy new graphics whistles and bells than it is for them to get the "usability" aspects fully ironed out.  Just look at how many years it took them to FINALLY offer gapless playback, which still has the issue of only working if VBR encodes are allowed to play from the VERY beginning of the song.  It's incredible that the Rockbox firmware has better implementation of gapless playback, and they offered it YEARS before Apple did on the SAME hardware.  Also, people have been screaming for configurable EQ capabilities for years, and this STILL isn't offered on the new units.  Honestly, is there anybody who actually LIKES having all those silly EQ presets instead of just having a modest set of sliders?  Just how dumb does Apple think we are?

There are a lot of nice aspects to the iPod, and frustrating as it is, I still find iPods to be the best mp3 player "overall."  I find it astounding, however, that even after 6 generations there are STILL some remarkably poor aspects to these units.  It's really frustrating that Apple spends most of it's time on the "candy" and not nearly enough time on the "meat."

Larry

[olarte]

Given the history, it's "amazing" to me but definitely not "surprising."  Apple always puts form over function -- it's VASTLY more important for them to offer fancy new graphics whistles and bells than it is for them to get the "usability" aspects fully ironed out. 

Larry

Very true Larry, but this is just UNFORGIVABLE that something as obvious as Coverflow and handling of Compilations is simply just broken... it's not just a lack of a feature (such as having alternative sorts for coverflow) but a major bug like showing 12 Album covers for a soundtracK??? Actually on some it will show 2 or 4 covers not one or all but only a handful with no reason why.

That is why I personally want to spread the word and have anyone that will listen fill a bug report at

http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html

PLEASE feel free  to copy & paste my original post, and put it out there on any Ipod Related forum that you frequent.

Thanks for listening to my rants. I'm a bit tired from staying up until 2:00am trying to see if there was something somewhere that was causing this !@#@! issue with coverflow.

[Osho]

Hi,

Serious bugs with cover flow and compilation about iPod Classic have already been reported in another thread in this forum. I just got my iPod classic 160GB a few hours ago and ran into another weird crash bug. iPod classic keeps on crashing again and again in some condition. Look at the youtube video for this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5mTmeXc5eA

The problem seems that when cover arts are enabled some (possibly "bad") cover art causes iPod classic to crash over and over again. If one disables cover art for the iPod, the problem goes away. This makes the player almost half-useless for me as I am planning to fill the entire 160GB with music . Navigating 160GB of music without cover art - nightmare!

Someone on ilounge forum wrote some script (http://bbauer.gomen.org/ipodcrash) to analyze this problem and found the following (I quote from a post on   http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=204909&page=3 by freecoder)

"It appeared that some files said that they had artwork (i.e. track.Artwork.Count != 0) but when I tried to access the first element of the artwork collection (looking at track.Artwork.Item(1).Format for example) I got an object error. When I looked at the track in iTunes, there was no artwork listed. This led me to believe that it might be the 'bad' tracks that caused the problem. When I unchecked these tracks but left artwork enabled, my 80G did not crash any longer"

My request to J River is to please make sure that they consider this in supporting iPod Classic for MC12 - I am sure they are working on it now .

Thanks,
Osho

[olarte]

  I came up with a temporary way  to fix the broken coverflow and compilation where compilations show multiple covers, and artists that are part of the compilation show up in the artist listing.

This will not alter the original ID3 tags on the source files but will on the Ipod.

1. Make sure Itunes (Ugh!) is set to manage music manually.

2. Sync the compilations to the Ipod.

3. Navigate to the IPOD (NOT THE Library music folder), then edit the artist right on the folder, and change each compilation or all of them to something generic like Soundtrack compilations etc....

The originals in the library will not be affected, but the Ipod at least will now group each compilation under one cover, and show up under the temporary "soundtrack compilations"...

Be careful though about automatic syncing playlists etc as that may alter the source files.

If you are concerned about accidents just  backup the original  compilations to another folder just in case on the PC.

the only drawback to this, is that if you really wanted to know who the artist is for a particular track, that will no longer be seen.

Does anyone know if MC can do a calculation and change tags automatically to add the artist to the track name?

Is there a way to run a script so the track name will be changed to [track name] - [Artist]?

Hope this helps, at least for now...

[Osho]

This is really interesting . I may just have to try this.

Osho

[olarte]

There is a firmware update for the Ipod Classic 1.0.1 but no info ANYWHERE on what it fixes...

it does not... I repeat, it DOES NOT fix the Cover Flow, or the Compilation (showing compilation artists in the artist list) BUGS...

and it resets all customization that you have done so back to hiding menus I don't like etc.

If you find out what it actually fixes, PLEASE post this info.

I feel like I paid $349 to be a beta tester.

Thanks in advance.

[olarte]

This is really interesting . I may just have to try this.

Osho

Osho, try it it is working for me it fixes both the coverflow, and the compilation\artist problem.

Now if anyone can help me change the track names to include the artist after that, that would be great.

[olarte]

By the way, I checked coverflow and complilations and they are still broken... so 1.0.1 did not  fix that. I wonder what it did fix... lag pehaps?

[olarte]

Hey Osho, I figured out a nice way to keep the data safe, and still show the artist right next to the track name see the following post.

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=42509.0

basically I'm making a user tag called [track name] then
change [name] field  to be [name] - [artist] then
then follow the procedure I mentioned where you add the compilations to the Ipod classic via Itunes
On the ipod change the artist to something generic like Soundtrack compilation

Now you will have compilations showing up under one artist in the Ipod, but the original artist will show next to the track name ie. Stand by me - Ben E. King etc...

Once this problem is fixed, you can then restore the name field back by simply changing [name] back to the value from the user field [track name]

Note: You only need\want to do this for the [Mix Album]=1 fields (compilations) Also, you may want to save or not save the user field [track name] in the files themselves or only in MC.

Hope this helps.