iPod large music collection and Intravee/Alpine

[Stuart Truman]

The Alpine KCA-420i has a limit of 511 Albums or Artists, and I suspect Blaupunkt may be similar based on the behaviour of my Ford. I have my entire music collection on an iPod Classic 160GB with about 2000 Artists and maybe 20,000 songs.

Any best known methods for structuring things such that I can use it to search accurately? Playlists etc?

 

[mrlozzer]

I've got the same iPod and find it's a real palaver selecting stuff through my DICE too.. I'm starting to wonder whether Flash USB drives might be a better option, but am worried about how quickly the music will load...

 

[markeg]

Stuart - have you looked at the Intravee forum, or pinged Intravee support? They're usually pretty responsive and may have some guidence...

 

[Taz]

ffs lol, how long are your drives, just delete some music, i'm sure there must be some you don't need

 

[srhutch]

I've got over 11k of songs and not noticed any issues. I have the iTunes setting set so it organises the folder structure.

I do also tend to use playlists more than browsing by Artist/Album.

 

[Stuart Truman]

srhutch, Playlists are the answer. I'll have to mess about with some that work for me. Maybe Artists A, B, C etc

Mark, it's a limitation of the Alpine KCA-420i not the Intravee. It's documented on their forum (first place I looked)

Taz x, That iPod has everything I own on it. Deliberate choice so that no matter what mood I'm in, I have the music on hand!

 

[srhutch]

What is the exact problem, I'll see if I can replicate.

 

[pvr]

I have a 1:1 for playlists per album. That seems to work fine for me.

 

[BigT]

I have the same issue. Searching by artist is rubbish as it only goes so far. I've found playlists grouped by a few artists works well for me.

 

[mrlozzer]

That iPod has everything I own on it. Deliberate choice so that no matter what mood I'm in, I have the music on hand!

I know the feeling.... the more music you have, the more choice you need to have. Could always buy a second-hand iPod cheap and have half on each.... mrs lozzer doesn't have this problem. She just pops a CD in the car and listens to it on heavy rotation for 6 months. Drives me absolutely mental...

 

[Putter Whore]

I put my 6 favourite playlists onto CD and use the iPhone sparingly. Not sure this helps you so I'm wondering as I type why I bothered at all.

 

[ZedFourM]

When I'm in the car, the iPod is set to "shuffle" and locked in the boot. Simples!

Note: I currently have 116,466 songs in my music library. Even using lossy MP3, that's still around 568Gb, so my first decision is which 160Gb worth of music to copy onto my iPod at any given time. I wish that I could find a solution that would allow me to have my full collection with me, but the 160Gb iPod is about the largest capacity MP3 player available (there are some players - mostly aimed at the video market, such as Archos - that have larger capacity, but they all have problems if you want to use them as vanilla MP3 players). The AudioVox MediaBridge in the Z4 can play music from a USB drive, but it struggles with anything over 4Gb, so I haven't even bothered trying to connect a large USB hard drive to it.

 

[Stuart Truman]

What is the exact problem, I'll see if I can replicate.

Once you hit 511 of anything, songs, albums, artists etc it just stops. It must be a hard coded thing as 512 is the next binary bit after 8 bits. 11111111 is 511 if my math is correct

I just need to sort playlists. I've never bothered before


Tapatalking...

 

[RichardP]

For some reason the AI-Net protocol for sending file numbers (which maps to Playlist/Artist/Album number on the KCA-420i) uses 2 bytes but only the 8 bits of the first byte and 1 bit of the second byte, this gives the 511 limit. It's really very stupid and irritating of Alpine as the capability is there just not the data!

If you exceed the 511 Artist limit there are a couple of things you can do that help :

1) Pretty obvious, but make sure that you don;t have duplicated Artist names with some minor difference, for example 'Pink Floyd' and 'Pink floyd'. Any subtle difference, even a trailing space, will result in multiple entries for the same artist.

2) If you have compilations in your collection then these often create lots and lots or Artists that have just one or two tracks each. iTunes and most iPods have a 'Compilations' facility which helps a lot here. Mark the Album as a compilation in iTunes, then on your iPod set the 'Compilations' option to 'On'. This will stop all tracks that are on compilation albums from appearing in the Artist list. You can now add the compilation albums to Playlists or access then from the Album menu if they are not after the 511 limit.

3) Artists are better to use for navigation than Playlists. After selecting an Artist you can then select an Album from the selected Artist, you can't do that with Playlists. So, you can create a dummy Artist for Artists you don't listen to often and then name the Albums by Artist/Album, you can then select the dummy artist and from there the actual Artist/Album you want. In theory you can access up to 511 * 511 (261121) Albums directly in this way.