It's sad that it comes to this, but Leftbrained has a tip on improving navigation on larger-storage iPods: Set up Smart Playlists for each letter of the alphabet (26 if you've been keeping track in the post-literate universe) to sort your collection by artist into the Smart Playlists.
Makes sense, in a hacker sort of way, although I'm hoping someone writes a script to do this automatically (or that Apple modifies the iPod OS to allow this behavior automatically); I'm not looking forward to manually creating the 26 playlists. But if you have 40 or 60 gig iPod, you probably tend to listen to artists that are towards the front of the alphabet—using the scrollwheel to get to that Wilco album you want to hear takes about sixty loops of the wheel. I've taken to just using Shuffle mode a lot so I hear things in the latter part of the alphabet.
This isn't surprising. The iPod wasn't designed for sixty gigs worth of mp3s. That's something on the order of 10,000 songs and, in my case at least, 400 different artists or bands. The original iPod was less than 10% of that. Interfaces need to change when their contexts change.
[via Lifehacker]
Posted by johndanseven at August 14, 2006 11:01 PM