I don't mean to sound so excited about something so seemingly mundane, but considering the other problem it helped me solve, I am pretty excited about it...
There's been some discussion here (by myself and others) about the apparent inability to delete an entire album from the music library of the Z1. It turns out you actually can, it's just extremely unintuitive. I don't know if this is listed anywhere in the manual (I haven't found it yet), but I stumbled across it this morning. I'm going by memory here, but I'm fairly certain this was the process...
First, go into the library, and select the album you want to delete. Then, select the icon in the upper-right hand corner that looks like a folder with an arrow pointing up; this will display the album list, with the current album highlighted. DON'T TOUCH THE ALBUM LIST, and select the "details" icon (the one that you can normally use to change the title of a track or delete a track). This will bring up the album information screen, with the album title, its pronunciation, genre, etc., but at the bottom is a button called "Delete Playlist," which will (after asking if you're sure) remove the entire album from the Z1. (If you were to touch a title in the album list, it would simply start playing that album, and throw you back into the track list, so you'd never see this option.)
If you're having trouble with the Z1's voice recognition of your albums, this is also where you can fix that. The top entry is the album title, and the next one is the pronunciation the Z1 uses to match that album in the library. Normally, this seems to be automatically populated with the album title, but at least two of my entries did not have this filled in (and I think this may have been only for CD-Text discs). By entering the titles there, I was able to get it to recognize those albums by voice. Another use for this is for albums that the Z1 doesn't seem to recognize, even if the pronunciation field is populated. I have one called "Exit 0" (as in "Exit Zero"), that the Z1 recognized only as "Exit O" (as in "the letter O"--it took some experimenting to figure that out). I simply changed the pronunciation to the spelled-out version, and it now hears it properly. So if you have any funky album titles that the Z1 has problems with, you can create a phonetic name for it to force the Z1 to recognize it. There is also a button to play back how the Z1 expects the title to be pronounced, so you can check that here as well, which will help when making phonetic adjustments to the pronunciation field.
This has eliminated two of my major complaints about the music library of the Z1. I just wish the iPod interface had voice recognition too...
Posted Jun 30, 2006 · 14:36 UTC#1