So, I just picked up my brand new G Sedan. I must say, it is AMAZING. I love the car, nearly everything about it. However, I am struggling with one aspect of it, that hopefully someone has a solution to. So, for those of you with an 08 G that uses the iPod connection (or anyone else with an idea), what is your solution to navigating artists/albums/etc. quickly. Is there anyway to scroll through artists pages at a time instead of one artist at a time? I have over 160 artists on my iPod, and, with the screen only showing 5 or 6 artists per page, it takes a long time to get from artist "A" to artist "Z". Is there anyway to get around this effectively? Thanks to everyone in advance for your help.

 

i have the same problem and havent found a solution yet...hopefully someone here knows something we dont.

 

People have found that changing the Genre or Composer (in Itunes) to match the first letter of the artist (A-Z and #) helps navigating. If you use Genre, then it will will show all artists that start with that letter > album subfolders > then songs. If you want to preserve the original Genre, then you can use the Composer field. This however (I believe) skips the artist folders and just dumps all the albums by (A artist for example) into one subfolder > then songs. I much prefer the Genre option, but some people like to use the original Genres for playlists and such......so up to you.

 

i dont mean to hijack the thread....but i noticed that the iPod wont shut off due to idling...after the car has been shut off for a while. Thats pretty annoying. Is there a way to change that?

 

Mine (both 3rd gen and 5th gen) did this at first. Someone mentioned turning off the "lock", so I tried it. So far I haven't had any further issues, however others have reported still having the problem. It's worth a shot though.

 

bfranks, this is the type of solution I was looking for, thanks so much for your input. However, I would like to keep my Genres intact. The Composer thing wouldn't work if it just piles all the artists with the same composer into one pile of songs. You could achieve the same effect by making a smart playlist and having it add the songs with all the artists with the same first letter. However, this isn't what I am looking for, because I want to still be able to discern between different artists>albums. Your approach with Genres is pretty much the type of thing I am looking for though, I just wish I could keep my genres in tact. This may, however, be a solution. If anyone else out there has a solution, please feel free to add your input.

 

The composer trick is slightly better then the playlist solution. Instead of dumping it into on long list of songs, it at leasts preserves the album folders. So as long as you know the name of the album, and don't have too many albums, it's a slightly better way to go.

I don't use genres for anything....so this may or may not work. Can't you just move the original genres to another blank entry (grouping, composer, etc) so that itunes and your iPod will still be able to sort it? That would allow you to use the genre for the A-Z and # for in the car.

 

I resorted to unplugging the iPod and locating the Artist or song or whatever using the iPod interface rather than the infiniti interface. Pretty low tech but it works. For the long term I have started to create a slew of play lists to match my various moods. I use the CD player and Compact Flash for that purpose also. The car has so many ways to listen to music it gives you a lot of options. Except for the Radio every song I play on any medium in the car is already on my iPod somewhere. If Infiniti gave us a more powerful interface into the iPod we wouldn't need any of the other stuff.

 

I could, indeed, do this. The genre fix is definitely a possible solution, and I will, in fact, resort to this if no other solution is presented. The only issue I have is marring my iTunes music library by changing the tags on all my songs. However, having multiple computers may help me here. I could just use my laptop's library and change the song genres, since that is my secondary computer anyways. Thanks again for the advice. searching through 26 options (one for each letter) is far superior than scrolling through 160 one at a time. Let me know if you have any other ideas though.

Oh, and I didn't realize that the Composer option preserves the album titles, thanks for pointing that out. This is definitely useful, until you start working with a lot of albums. Good idea though, and likely useful for those with few albums per artist, assuming you know which album belongs to which artist.

 

I did quite a bit of looking, as the Infiniti iPod interface was a major disappointment for me. What's been mentioned (genre / composer / playlists, or unplugging the iPod to find the song) are about your only options.

Just a thought.... Changing the tag info doesn't actually write the info to the file. So you can change all the genres, sync the iPod, delete all the songs out of iTunes, and re-import all the song (with original genres). That's a lot of work, and is only a temporary solution if you add music to your library on a regular basis. But if you get creative there are ways to have it both ways. I spend a lot of time listening to my iPod in the car, so it was worth it to me.

 

I was actually trying to do some research as well about how iTunes handles song info. If you look at the information on the the song file itself, from finder or explorer (depending on whether you have mac or pc), it shows the the composer and genre info. I tried changing the genre of one song, deleting it, and then importing it again, and it does not change the genre back to what it was. Is it necessary to have two copies of the song, have one set of originals and the second set with the new genres? Thanks again for the help. I will take your advice since I trust that you have done research to no avail.

 

Odd....I do it all the time (change artist, genre, etc) and it never writes it to the file. When I import it again everything reverts back to it's original info. I actually had to buy a 3rd party program to change the ID3 tags.

 

Interesting.......obviously I haven't done it in a while. I just tested it and it does indeed change the ID3 tag now. I wonder when they added that in.... So that idea is out. I guess I need to be a little more cautious about what I change now

 

Well, I didn't think you were wrong, I thought maybe it was just a difference between mac and pc (I use macs). But, it looks like they must have changed that feature with one of the updates. I'm glad it was brought out though, so now you know. I know you can have multiple libraries on a computer though, so I am currently researching a way to have a library with the real genre and one with the genres for my iPod. However, I don't think I can make it happen without having two complete copies of the libraries. I'll let you know what I find, but it is definitely looking like changing the genre field to letters of the alphabet will be the most efficient way of getting what I want. Although, searching by genre is probably a solution that is the easiest. Creating, say, 10 basic genre fields will cut your artists by a large amount when searching. I will let you know if I find anything.