On many occasions, I've been listening to the iPOD or whatever, and wanted see the song name, artist info etc. Has anyone discovered an easy way to do this without going to the AV screen? I always keep mine on the GPS map and I just want that little info bar to appear across the bottom of the screen, like if you skip up or down a song. Ideas?

I can only assume there aren't any.

I was wondering the same things... I haven't really read anything in the manual that tells you how to do that.. Of course it would be pretty easy to miss.. There must be a way -- I thought I saw a couple people posting install shots showing this exact config you and I want.. Except I think that was when they were playing music from 'Library' and not 'Ipod' -- but you'd think it would work just the same..

anyone else with ideas?

As happy as I am with my Z1, this is one of the many issues with the UI that make it obvious how little time Pioneer spent actually test this system.

There's plenty of real estate on the screen to always have this information available (along with phone battery and signal levels when using BT). The other issue is because of the slow speed getting info from the iPod, when the song does change and the song shows up there is barely any time to read the name before it disappears again.

Frustrating to say the least, but hopefully the Z2 will have a much more refined UI.

So will we be able to upgrade our Z1 to Z2 through software??...

My understanding is that Pioneer offers free minor software upgrades (similar to CDDB updates) for Z1 systems, and that you can purchase major software upgrades to add features and functionality. That is how it worked with the D1 -> D2, N1 -> N2, etc. upgrades, so it makes sense the that the same thing would be true for the Z series.

If that isn't the case, we're going to have to figure out how to change these things on our own, because we could make this system light years easier to use.