I have been an iPod fan for years. If your like me you have thousnads of songs and refuse to go anywhere without them. Last year I bought the new Alpine single din head unit that had iPod control. It was awesome, however, scrolling through 5,000+ songs and 700+ artists can be tedious to say the least when you are going 70 mph, or sitting still for that matter. I created a system that's incredibly easy for me to navigate.

Let me warn you, the more music you have, the longer this is going to take, but the greater the reward. I took a few letters at a time and knocked this out in a couple of nights. Here goes...

On the iPod only - NOT IN ITUNES - change each Artist name to the first letter of their name. Example, A for Aerosmith, M for Motley Crue, # for 10 Years, etc. Then change the Album to the artist name. If you have multiple albums by the same artist you can set them up like this...

Linkin Park (Meteora)

Linkin Park (Hybrid Theory)

etc...

Leave the song name as is.

The end result will be this: when you hit "artist" you will have about 27 options (#-Z) rather than hundreds. Then once you select your artist, let's say it's "D", you will then see Dave Matthews, David Gray, and so on.

Some of you think this is dumb, others hopefully will love it as much as I do. I can literally access any one of my 5,000 songs in under 10 seconds. The reason I posted to this site is because I just installed the D3 and it utilizes this system beautifully!

Once you get this done, you just have to do this for newly added music each time, and of course this will require you to have iTunes set to manually manage rather than sync.

Enjoy! (if you want)

I have to say that is a pretty ingenious idea!

I just recently bought both an Ipod and the AVIC-D3. I love the Ipod interface on the D3 and being able to carry all my music in my glove compartment but my only problem was scrolling down the the "Artist" that, heaven forbid, starts with the letter "Y". That takes just WAY too long and is one of my two gripes regarding the head unit (the other gripe is that there isn't more information that shows on the screen when I use my Sirius...but that's another matter.

One question, how do you change the artists and albums on just the Ipod only without changing it in Itunes? This might be a dumb question because I'm still new with the Ipod thing.

You do it through iTunes, but instead of changing all of the information in your 'Library', click on your iPod on the left hand side of the screen. You should then see all of the music that is on your iPod only, and you can change it from there.

I've never used it, so I don't know if it would change everything back, but I would make sure you have 'Auto-sync' off just to be safe.

You do it through iTunes, but instead of changing all of the information in your 'Library', click on your iPod on the left hand side of the screen. You should then see all of the music that is on your iPod only, and you can change it from there.

 

I've never used it, so I don't know if it would change everything back, but I would make sure you have 'Auto-sync' off just to be safe.

Yea, you cant edit any info on the ipod without itunes, unless your using some other app this is not possible.

As soon as I posted that message, I figured that I'd have to edit the Ipod songs through Itunes that way.

I'm gonna give it a try because I primarily use the Ipod in my car with the D3 and it's extremely frustrating to hold the down icon for minutes at a time (especially while driving) to get to some artist farther down on the list.

Thanks for the tip!

I knew someone would like it. I'm telling you once your done it's awesome. Plus, if you decide one day you hate it, just put your regular library on the ipod. I even make backups of the ipod every few weeks so that if something happened to the ipod I wouldn't have to start over.

I did something very similar. For the GENRES category (Which i almost never use), I put the Letters there A, B, C, D, ... , Z, #

Therefore, under A you have your Artists that begin with A, etc...

Therefore, I can look for Albums AND Artists by letter.

Thanks Carbon12. That was an even better idea. I changed all the Genres in my Ipod to the A-Z format last night and now it works great. Took a few hours but was easily worth it now. I can actually access any song in just a few seconds now. Who'd a thunk.

I go to Itunes, click on left hand side and still can't figure out how to edit Artist, Title, Generes... Anyone?

In itunes, plug in your ipod and click MANUALLY UPDATE MUSIC in the settings area for the ipod. That will allow you to access and edit the files on the ipod.

did the genres mod to my original files on my hard drive. I don't care about the genres category anyway. This way I can have the ipod auto sync.

Works great on the Z2. I was able to find what I wanted in a very short time, well enough for a car interface. This makes the IB100II interface worthwhile.

thanks for the tips guys!

thank you for these posts. This will certainly make my life easier.

I often wonder why we have to come up with creative ways of doing the obvious...not just with the D3 and Ipods, but with all media entertainment across the home...

Anyways, great forum here, so very helpful!

one more thing, I use a GREAT program called ID3-TagIT for editing my ID3 tags.

http://www.id3-tagit.de

It's very very intuitive and easy to edit massive amounts of data. ( I've used it to edit 1,000's of songs in one swoop).

This is a great program to update your genres in one shot.

one thing i tried last night that i def dont like is making 27 smart playlists that grab artists by "starts with" and then a-z for the 26 and 0-9 for the 27th

sounds good but when you browse.. you get songs not artists.. this is crappy disappointing b/c it would be the obvious best solution

I do like the genre suggestion but i have about 10 different genres of music and well that just wont do

Awesome tip! I was wondering how the hell to control 40gb of music without arriving at my destination before I find a song. The D3 does need a little work in that area along with scrolling but you should know what you have in your collection anyway. Thanks for thinking outside the box.

Also I would recommend updating the Album Artist tab also so if you ever want to go back and rename them you'll know who it was.

worked great thanks for the tip

Great info in this thread. I've got a Z2, and am now in the process of updating the genres for my iPod collection. Thanks.

one more thing, I use a GREAT program called ID3-TagIT for editing my ID3 tags.

 

http://www.id3-tagit.de

 

It's very very intuitive and easy to edit massive amounts of data. ( I've used it to edit 1,000's of songs in one swoop).

 

This is a great program to update your genres in one shot.

Did you use this to add the A, B, C...to the genre list? If so, care to share your method? I've figured out how to add the Album name to the genre field, but this doesn't really help.

Thanks.

Thats a great idea, but I dont feel like spending 5 days straight changing all the music I have. It does sound like an awesome idea, +1 for a cool idea, but I will just stick with playlists. Its alot easier for me. I look up the local stations playlists and make mine to match theirs, then label the playlist for that station. I also have playlists for different genres, which I put the music I like for that genre, then I have one last playlist which is popular which means all the music that everyone seems to like or the radio stations play. its alot easier for me.