An 8GB Fuze can hold a really large number of artists and albums (especially with an add-on card). Currently, scrolling through hundreds of artists to get to an artist towards the end of the alphabet is extremely tedious. The proposed “wrap around” scrolling could help a bit, but I think a top level index that could filter the artist/album list would be the ideal solution.
For example, going to the artists list would bring up an alphabet index. You would first select a letter, then you would get a filtered list of artists that begin with that letter.
The recent Sony players have a really nice implementation of this. This review at ABI has a video that shows how the navigation works:
Sony’s implementation is pretty sophisticated in that the index adapts to the total number of items. For example, a smaller library might have indexes for A-H, I-P, etc. While a larger library might have A-C, D-F, etc. I’d be happy with a straight alphabet list + one item for numbers/symbols.
Seems like it would be pretty trivial to implement. Does anyone else think something like this would be useful?
Message Edited by Skinjob on 05-27-2008 01:41 PM
