Itve just reorganised my playlists so that artists are divided by initial letter (rather than in groups of three initial letters - abc, def, ghi, etc). Now, I don't get a shaded background behind each menu item; it's just enlarged. This can make it less obvious which letter is selected - see attached image. I'd prefer it if some padding were added to the selected item if necessary in order for it to be highlighted.

A quick fix might be to add a space before and after the letter.

When I tried adding spaces around single-letter playlist names, they appeared in emptool but were gone after a sync - and didn't show up on the player. To pad the names, I'd have to use something ugly like '-' or underscore.

Why are you dividing it up into so many sub-levels of the tree like that? Why not just put all the artists at the root?

Is it actually easier to select when you do it that way? Because if it were me, I'd get irritated at having to go so many levels deep into the tree to select something.

I will add the lack-of-highlight thing to the bug list, though.

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Why are you dividing it up into so many sub-levels of the tree like that? Why not just put all the artists at the root?

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Because that's how I want to organise it .

Seriously, there's more than one way of doing things, and I personally prefer to have an extra layer of menus with a couple of dozen entries in each than to have one huge menu and have to scroll through 500 or so artists (okay, it's only half that because the menus wrap around..) Using the letter keys on the remote is often counterproductive in this, as I like to sort by surnames (hmm, I remember having a "record-store order" discussion last year). I don't expect everyone to share my preferences, but at least respect them!

Tony, with hundreds of artists.... that is a lot of spinning of the dial!

I do the A-B, C-D, E-F etc... soon I will have to break down each letter.

I don't expect everyone to share my preferences, but at least respect them!

Sorry, I did not mean to disrespect. I simply asked why, and stated that if it were me, I would have done it differently.

Toby, I don't think that Tony meant any disrespect. He was just offering another way to do something. I'm with you however. Just doing my A-B, C-D format, I still have over 45 artists in each directory.

Mine seems to highlight and slightly magnify the letters the way it should. I'm running 2.0b7 on a Mk2 with single letters and no spacing. I would post a picture of it but screen capture is not working on JEmplode.

I'm starting to run into that situation. With a playlist of artists, I spin the knob for quite a long time before arriving at what I want. Oh I wish there was speech recognition for doing this.

Calvin

OK got screen grab to work. For those interested or non-believers here's the picture.

I notice yours were upper case and his were lower case. Do you lose the highlight if yours are lower case?

Your right lower case has no highlight only upper case. The lower case do increase in size somewhat though. Personally if your going to do your playlists this way being they are single letters mine would be capitalize anyway.

I also noticed that jwickis's playlists were capital letters - they're a bit wider, so it's not surprising that they highlight properly (I wonder about 'I', though). The wider lower-case letters (f, m, v, w, x) get highlit.

So a workaround is to use capital letters. As someone with a Unix background, they are a bit alien to me , but I'll consider it. Upper case is generally harder to read, with the letters being more similar in shape than the lower-case letters are - there's a reason most road signs are in mixed case...

Of course, this is only a cosmetic issue, and it doesn't actually ruin my enjoyment of the player...

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Sorry, I did not mean to disrespect.

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I should have written my post more carefully - it does sound like I was really offended by your question. Of course I'm not, and we both know there are different ways of doing things, that suit each of us differently well.

Sorry for the confusion.

they're a bit wider, so it's not surprising that they highlight properly (I wonder about 'I', though).

Yes the capital 'i' or 'I' doesn't get highlighted it is the only capital letter that won't highlight.

Umm, you do know that on any playlist, you can press the number keys on the remote to automatically pop you to the first instance of the corresponding letter, right?

I still split my artists into 2 lists, A-L and M-Z. If I was browsing the second list, pressing "8" would take me to the first artist starting with "T", pressing "8" again will take me to "U" etc...

Of course if you're can't use the remote, then this becomes moot.

I suspect a hack can be implemented in Hijack however to do something similar.... I can't remember if I've read anyone asking for this implementation, but I recall something similar.

Anyway, what about being able to assign a special function to a key that would sequentially run through the letters of the alphabet each time it's pressed? That would be simulated with numbers of course. And have to take into account the special "0" case for "q" and "z." A similar button could be made to go backwards. Then you'd basically have a very quick way of skipping between a lot of songs.

Bruno

Or the sounds-nice-in-theory-but-frustrating-in-practice method:

Rather than doing A-L, M-Z, make categories for your artists grouped this way:
1 (has artists that start with A D G J M P T W)
2 (has artists that start with B E H K N R U X)
3 (has artists that start with C F I L O S V Y)
Then you select the number (1 through 3) and then you can press the letter on the remote to go to that section. Example: You want to find Shania (I sort by first name) select 3 from the top menu, then press 7 on the remote. Since nothing in sub-list 3 starts with P or R, it goes straight to the S section.

And I'm supposed to remember which letters fall into which of the three top level lists? Oh man...

Bruno

That's the "frustrating-in-practice" part. Not really a scheme I feel like trying, but I s'pose some people might be farmiliar enough with that layout (sending lots of SMS from their cell phones) to have it actually work well for them.

My Nokia uses predictive text. So count me out of that whacky scheme.

Bruno

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Umm, you do know that on any playlist, you can press the number keys on the remote to automatically pop you to the first instance of the corresponding letter, right?

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Right. That's why I mentioned that I sort by surname (because that's the order my passengers expect), making this feature less useful.