I've had the SH-AWD with tech for a couple of weeks and love it. Love the iPod integration that I so desperately wanted back when I bought my '05 TL.

So here's the question. I have 1,000 or so songs on my ipod and find it very difficult to search and then get to a song quickly using the TL interface. For example, if you wanted to play "Waitin' For the Bus" by "ZZ Top", there are two main choices to get there - both of which seem too cumbersome. You can "Search by Artists" and then spend about 2 minutes turing the dial a hundred times until you get to "ZZ Top" or you can "Search by Song" and spend even longer scrolling through 950 songs before you get to the "W's".

Anyone have any work arounds? Or maybe I'm just not aware of a feature in the TL that alows for a better search method (perhaps like the way to address book lookup works for the bluetooth phone - grouping a few letters at a time with a subsequent drill down)?

I'm toying with building smart playlists in itunes such as "Songs A-D, Songs E-H, Songs I-K" ... etc. that I can then use to drill down under the "Playlists" feature. This seems to be an okay work around but not my favorite. Any other ideas?

 

I don't think it's the TL interface, I think it's your iPod setup. I too have about 1000 songs on my iPhone 16GB and I can get to any of them rather quickly with the TL Nav interface. I would suggest setting up better playlists to make the searches easier and quicker? Don't just put Rock, then have 400 songs, under rock, break it down to more individual playlists. I have a Elton John playlist with only 16 songs, but it makes it easy to find for me and I have 38 playlists. I just added my U2 collection the other day, and although there's 78 songs in that playlist, I can still get to them rather quickly by selecting the U2 playlist, then scrolling down with the Nav button/wheel. I entered the U2 songs by date released, so I know Vertigo will be by the bottom of the list. It's all about the iPod setup if you ask me, I hope this helps?

 

I agree Phinman, the ipod controls on the TL should allow a far more quicker and easier search mechanism. A software upgrade that will allow to search by alphabet, such as the way the phonebook controls.

 

not much you can do but search by album? Playlists are what work for me. I may currently be only interested in hearing some say 200 songs. I every so often add / delete songs to my current interested in hearing song playlist. Had a xmas playlist for the kids just un-selected that from the list of playlists for that iPod. like bmode said in at least the short term try breaking the songs down to lists

 

Thought this myself as I was scrolling through the 300 albums on my thumbstick =( It just doesn't make sense. Obviously it has the capability, since the phone book has it. Why not the radio too?!?

 

Thanks for the thoughts. Sounds like playing with the playlists is the only option at this point. Unless you only have a hundred or so songs, the search by song feature is pretty much useless. I suppose it is possible that this could be fixed pretty easily with a software upgrade, but the chances of that are probably about as good as the dealer calling me back and saying he wants to give me $5 grand back from my sales price.

 

In case it's helpful, here's what I ended up doing...

In iTunes, there's a cateogry/field for every song called "Grouping". For my library (1,000 +), this field was not used for any song so I decided to use it help build by alpha groups. I sorted my entire library by title name, then using the multiple file change feature in iTunes I made groups about every 100 songs, labeling the first "1", then "2" and so on - took about 5 minutes in total.

Then I created SmartPlaylists, the first labeled "Songs A-C" with the critera being "group = 1". Next group is "Songs D-F" with the criteria being "group = 2". Seems to work pretty well. Requires a little maintenance when you add songs to your itunes library, but not really much. Now when linked to my TL I search via playlist and then go to the alpha groups for songs to quickly get to a song I'm looking for. No more spinning the knob a 100 times to get to the end of the alphabet.

There's a few other options I played with that accomplished the same thing, but requires some nesting of smartplaylists. Anyway, I know this is a little geeky but it may be helpful for someone out there.

 

Phinman, thanks for the tip. Will this method work for albums as well? For instance, can I set it up so that it displays playlists/albums A-C, D-F, etc etc?

 

I don't see that field in iTunes? 'Grouping'? I have song name, time, aritist, album, genre, rating, play count, last played, and year

 

CRXB, check out the pic below. I think it's control+J for PC users, Mac users hit command+J. Or you can just use the mouse and go the menus, but I always use key strokes to save my wrist from getting RSI.

 

thanks phinman and bmode