How many songs will the HDD hold if you burn them straight from a CD? How about if you burn them from an MP3 format? Thanks in advance :D

You can't rip MP3's. You can only play those from a disc.

oh, okay. do you know about how many songs it will hold? Oh yeah, and do you know if you can delete songs from it?

DieselNuts said:

oh, okay. do you know about how many songs it will hold? Oh yeah, and do you know if you can delete songs from it?

According to the manual, it has space for "up to 200" CDs, but it also mentions a limit of 400 albums total, so I guess if each CD only has a few songs on it, it will handle up to 400 of them.

You can delete songs, but (at least from my experimentation with it), you must do it one at a time, and it takes about 10 seconds to delete each song. That doesn't sound like much, but if you want to delete an entire CD, you have to do it track by track. So I've become highly selective of exactly what CDs I insert into the unit.

One thing I don't like about the unit is navigating the music library; you can only navigate by album title or artist name from the top level (or song title, but that's pretty much useless). So if you want to select by album, all of your albums appear in the list, sorted in the order that you originally recorded them into the unit, and you have to scroll through the list to find more recent ones. If you want to search by artist, you do a similar search through a list of artists, but you can't then select an album by that artist; the Z1 just starts playing all of the songs by the selected artist, apparently in alphabetical order by song title.

If anyone knows of a way to search by artist name, then by album, I would like to hear about it... I only have about 45 albums in mine so far, and it's already becoming a pain to navigate...

just recently ordered the z1 and it'll be here tomorrow, excited-cant wait but installer cant get it in until next week :( BUT i am a little dissapointed to hear this. that actully sounds like it sucks!

Does anyone know how to configure or tweek the HD so one can access the library in a more user friendly fashion? That's a lot of songs to have to plug down each one...!

I agree Marauder, the navigation of the music library is CRAP!

I've not yet found a way to select a specific artists album, or a specific song by a specific artist. Here is my list of gripes:

1) When browsing the "Artist" list, once an artist is selected it starts playing the first song by the artist. It does not navigate down into the artists albums or songs, I wish it would wait for me to hit "Play". It just starts playing all songs by the artist.

2) When browsing the "Albums" it only displays the name of the album, not the name of the arist or any other information. This forces you to memorize the name of the albums versus basing everything off the name of the Artist.

3) Inability to browse around while playing any source. I would figure if you are listening to AM/FM/CD/Sat/Library it should let you select a particular song before it cuts over. It doesn't. Once you select an Artist name or Album name it starts playing. It should let me look until I hit play on a particular song or artist name before interrupting what I'm listening to.

4) Inability to remove an entire album (as you mentioned). Manually deleting an album song by song is a joke. Where is the logic? We need to ability to "select" an artist/album and not jump into the folder so we can then delete it or play it.

5) Updates to CDDB. I read on the Pioneer web site that if you have a CD that is not recognized, and want to get an updated version of the CDDB, just enter the song names manually, and viola... it upodated. They must be joking. With the new site the FAQ/Knowledge base seach is gone, but it was there!

I severely doubt it, but very much hope for improved navigation in the music library as future updates come out. I can only imagine what this will be like with 200 albums in the unit. I know there is a 99.9% change this will never happen unless all the users of the unit request it somehow. Or bad press comes out.

-Jeff

mhyde71 said:

just recently ordered the z1 and it'll be here tomorrow, excited-cant wait but installer cant get it in until next week :( BUT i am a little dissapointed to hear this. that actully sounds like it sucks!

Does anyone know how to configure or tweek the HD so one can access the library in a more user friendly fashion? That's a lot of songs to have to plug down each one...!

After posting what I did about navigating the music library yesterday, last night I tried once again to use the voice recognition feature. I figured out I wasn't quite doing it properly before, and long story short, once the Z1 was in "Album" mode, I just pressed the voice command button, said "Music Search," waited for the prompt, then said the album title I was looking for. I tried four last night, and another five or so on my way to work this morning, and it recognized all of them. When I played around with the voice commands before, I thought it just wasn't recognizing the commands I was speaking, but it turns out I was trying to use the wrong commands in the wrong context. So the voice recognition option seems to provide a good alternative to music navigation, once you get the hang of it. I'm not sure how it would handle two albums with the same title, though (like "Greatest Hits"), but for what I've stored in it so far, it seems to work well.

Now if I could just figure out all of the voice commands for vehicle navigation...

jbell73 said:

2) When browsing the "Albums" it only displays the name of the album, not the name of the arist or any other information. This forces you to memorize the name of the albums versus basing everything off the name of the Artist.

Have you had any luck with the voice recognition? Still forces you to remember the names of albums, but as I said in my response to mhyde71 above, it works better now that I know how to use it.

jbell73 said:

5) Updates to CDDB. I read on the Pioneer web site that if you have a CD that is not recognized, and want to get an updated version of the CDDB, just enter the song names manually, and viola... it upodated. They must be joking. With the new site the FAQ/Knowledge base seach is gone, but it was there!

What I've done for the two CDs I have entered into the Z1 that it did not recognize was extract them to my hard drive using Nero, and had it tag the songs from CDDB. I then burned them to CD-RW discs with CD-Text, and the Z1 loaded them perfectly from those CDs. It's a bit of a hassle, but I'm in the process of ripping my CD collection to a computer on my home network anyway, so it really wasn't too much trouble for me. But I would much rather do this than type in the information (in ALL UPPERCASE) using the Z1's interface...

Marauder said:

After posting what I did about navigating the music library yesterday, last night I tried once again to use the voice recognition feature. I figured out I wasn't quite doing it properly before, and long story short, once the Z1 was in "Album" mode, I just pressed the voice command button, said "Music Search," waited for the prompt, then said the album title I was looking for. I tried four last night, and another five or so on my way to work this morning, and it recognized all of them. When I played around with the voice commands before, I thought it just wasn't recognizing the commands I was speaking, but it turns out I was trying to use the wrong commands in the wrong context. So the voice recognition option seems to provide a good alternative to music navigation, once you get the hang of it.

Naturally, after posting that yesterday, I found two albums that the Z1 absolutely refuses to recognize by voice, no matter how clearly I enunciate the titles. I have a CD called "Tainted Angel," and when I say that title, it keeps going to a different CD called "Blame the Vain." This is regardless of how slowly and clearly I say it, it just won't get it right. Another one called "Just Add Ice" it interprets as "Cancel." So my euphoria over the voice recognition is somewhat diminished, but it's still impressive when it does get it right.

I also discovered in my experimentation that voice recognition does not work when playing the iPod; if you try to use it, it switches over to the Music Library and searches that instead. I wonder why they didn't add support for voice with the iPod interface? They have all the text right there, it seems like it should work the same with the recognition software as the internal library...

Marauder said:

Naturally, after posting that yesterday, I found two albums that the Z1 absolutely refuses to recognize by voice, no matter how clearly I enunciate the titles. I have a CD called "Tainted Angel," and when I say that title, it keeps going to a different CD called "Blame the Vain." This is regardless of how slowly and clearly I say it, it just won't get it right. Another one called "Just Add Ice" it interprets as "Cancel." So my euphoria over the voice recognition is somewhat diminished, but it's still impressive when it does get it right.

Let me reply to my reply to myself...

I fixed this problem, and also found out how to delete an entire album from the Z1... I explain it in the topic "You CAN delete an entire album from the music library!" in this forum.