Alphabet Navigation

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Fuze™
1

Thank you for the wrap around scrolling. Can I make a suggestion to improve the navigation? I realised in the  ‘albums’ and ’ artists’ lists we navigate using the wheel and the left and right buttons. Since the Up and down buttons are not used, I was wondering if you could use them to jump from each of the Alphabets in the List. Like Akon ->Beyonce -> Coldplay. It will really help navigating to an artist in the middle of your list eg. Maroon 5 with 13 clicks rather than 50 turns on the wheel.

If that is not possible maybe we could group the artist in directories by their first Alphabet. Thanks.

2

I would like to add to this, I think it could work by just pressing the down button for a while, when you are navigating through your songs, pictures or videos. First you hold down the down button for a couple of seconds, and instead of getting the action menu, you get the alphabet at the top of the screen. Then you can scroll through the letters and numbers. By pressing the down button again you would exit this mode, and with a short click you could open the action menu.

What do you think, would this be plausible?

3

I absolutely agree.  The wrap around is definitely appreciated, but it doesn’t really solve the problem.  If you’re looking for something at the end of the list, it’s a big help.  But finding something in the middle is still incredibly tedious.  I really want to add an 8GB card to my Fuze, but because long list navigation is so tedious and impractical already, there’s not much point in doubling my content and making it even worse.

Now that the large playlist issue has been fixed (thank you!), this is really my only significant complaint.  If the long list navigation problem could be solved, the Fuze would be darn near perfect.

We really need an alpha index, accelerated scrolling, or preferably, both.  Sandisk - please, please consider this for the next FW.

4

If you can remember the genre,  Album,  or Artist of the song you want,  then you can narrow your search times alot.

5

@sansafix wrote:
If you can remember the genre,  Album,  or Artist of the song you want,  then you can narrow your search times alot.

Specifically, the Artist list is what I would like to be able to use.  But, I’ve got over 500 artists on my 8GB Fuze.  Scrolling into the middle of the list takes a long time and countless revolutions.  Which aside from being tedious also makes it impossible to use in the car or when doing any other activity that prevents you from dedicating several minutes to staring at the player and scrolling.  The Album list is even worse and the Song list is completely unusable.

An index would be ideal, but if it’s technically not feasible for some reason, accelerated scrolling should be pretty simple.   For example, after x number of revolutions, start scrolling a page at a time instead of a line at a time.  Having both an index and acceleration would allow any size library to be navigated without problem.

I really hope you consider this feature.  If it’s already a problem on an 8GB player, what’s going to happen when people start adding 16GB cards?

Message Edited by Skinjob on 10-06-2008 01:12 PM

6

I am in favor of a progressive, or at least a stepped-scan rate in the future.  The rate should increase if the scroll wheel is rotated above a set threshold, to a higher scan rate.

Bob  :wink:

7

Well, that does work ok, but if you want to continue to shuffle all you songs after playing that one file. Well, then this is not a solution!

From what I’ve seen this is one of the things that have been most complained about in the reviews of the fuze. It might even be what keeps many from buying it, so it would definetly be a good thing to add such a feature :).

Message Edited by rizzly on 10-07-2008 08:19 AM

8

Yes, please add this feature! I have 2500 selections on my Fuze (4GB+4GB card), and even with the improved scrolling it can be very annoying to find something that’s somewhere in the middle of the alphabet. I worry whether I should bother getting a larger capacity card.

My wife has a Sony player that has a nice alphabetical browser. I love my Fuze but I envy that one feature of her player!

9

@cmhodge wrote:

Yes, please add this feature! I have 2500 selections on my Fuze (4GB+4GB card), and even with the improved scrolling it can be very annoying to find something that’s somewhere in the middle of the alphabet. I worry whether I should bother getting a larger capacity card.

My wife has a Sony player that has a nice alphabetical browser. I love my Fuze but I envy that one feature of her player!

Yeah, I’ve been holding off getting an 8GB card for the same reason.  The Sony implementation of an alpha index is really nice.  I’d love to see something similar on the Fuze.

10

We are looking at progressive speed up of the scroll.  Alphabet Nav is a big change and will not be implemented on this product.

Message Edited by sansafix on 10-15-2008 10:09 AM

11

Thank you for the reply. Hoping to see progressive scrolling in the next firmware update! Don’t forget the sleep timer too. Thanks! :smileyvery-happy:

12

Thanks for the info Sansafix,

I’m sorry to hear about the alpha scrolling option being off the table. But how about an artist specific song list.

Since I pretty much know the artist I’m looking for, I could see the advantage of having a seperate song list under the artist entry.

I would like to be able to place different versions of songs from different albums into a go list (if you are a Zappa or a Crimson fan you will understand) and this would be very useful to accomplish this task. Scrolling through  hundreds of titles to make this happen on the fly would be a pain. 

Again, thanks for being so accessible Sansafix!

Message Edited by bobletteross on 10-15-2008 12:48 PM

13

No you will have to navigate from Artist into the particular album and pick out the song title.

14

How about an option to see a song list after choosing an artist or genre, instead of just seeing albums, and a quick way to toggle back and forth between the song list and the album list. It would be nice to also be able to select an artist or genre, then have songs from that group play in random order.

I hope a return to podcast and a return to audiobook function is added to the next firmware, so that I can listen to part of a podcast or audiobook, then several different songs, then be able to return to the place I was in in the podcast or audiobook that was last listened to, without remembering the title or which album it is in. I would also like podcasts or audiobooks that have been listened to completely to have a mark next to the title indicating that.

15

A progressive or threshold-switched scan would be better than an alphabetical search, as you can simply watch the letters whiz by, the first ones (the “alphabetical search” ) much slower, being exactly what you’re looking for anyway.

For implementation, trying the different methods of speed increase for ease of use will be the primary test.

I agree, reinventing the GUI, adding another layer of navigation on top of a simple interface would be counterproductive.

We can use one of several methods:

Rotation time would trigger a faster scroll if the wheel is continually rotated for more than a set interval, speeding up the scan, until momentarily stopped.  If your song starts with a letter early in the list, the device may start to rocket past the desired letter, necessitating a reverse roll to find it.  This is dpendent upon the rate increase.

Rotation speed would trigger a faster scroll if the wheel is rotated above a set rate.  If you’re looking for something in the middle of the alphabet, a fast roll will trigger a fast scan.  As you approach the desired letter, slowing down will return the Sansa to a slower, more precise scrolling.

The trick is to find an acceptable mode, or a combination of both, leading to a smooth search.  My favorite would be rotation speed, with a variable or several-step speed increases, much like holding the >> button does with running through an audio track.

Come to think of it, we would actually be “reinventing the wheel” by improving it, figuratively speaking.

Time for a listen…

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

Message Edited by neutron_bob on 10-16-2008 06:59 AM

16

@neutron_bob wrote:

I agree, reinventing the GUI, adding another layer of navigation on top of a simple interface would be counterproductive.

I’m guessing the UI’s not the problem.  If you’ve ever seen Sony’s implementation, it fits right in the list model, is extremely intuitive, and doesn’t add another layer at all (if you’re curious, check out the Sony A810 Review on ABI).  I’m guessing the difficulty is probably in creating the necessary supporting indexes in the internal database.

Well, hopefully they can work out an acceptable progressive accelerated scrolling method.  I’m skeptical about how effective this is going to be on an 8+16GB Fuze where you could easily have over 5000 songs.  And since they bumped the Clip to 8GB, I’m guessing there will probably be a 16GB Fuze before too long. Which would mean you could have a 16+32GB Fuze in a year or so with 10000+ songs.   I think to be effective the acceleration would have to be so quick that it might be hard to control.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

17

 

Come to think of it, we would actually be “reinventing the wheel” by improving it, figuratively speaking.

 

Your descriptions sound pretty much like how the iPod works these days. Not much reinventing required.

The Zen Vision:M had a crazy/awful physical interface, but you could click right an an alphabet list would appear. Scrolling takes you up/down an alphabet. Click left, and you’re back on the main list at the first song/artist/album that starts with the letter you selected. My daughter had one and I only used it a few times, but I could still find stuff faster than the iPod I’d used for years!

I’ve noticed right/left click on the Fuze doesn’t do anything in lists, so the Fuze could theoretically do it. It clearly just wasn’t designed for the quantity of songs that one could have on a fully-loaded Fuze.

Message Edited by bdb on 10-16-2008 11:12 AM

18

Bob - you are so right.

Progressive scrolling is an absolutely vital component on today’s/tomorrows expandable players.  It seems to me that this is likely to be a big selling point as memory size grows and grows, i.e… no accelerated scrolling = falling sales.  I have only about 2000 songs on my players [fuze and E280] and to find a list of songs in mid-alphabet is a no-go exercise.  I first bought an E280 because it had the accelerated scrolling through songs - vital for audio books [not then available on Sony].  For this purpose you simply hold the left or right button [the changing bar colour is a nice feature on the E200 - shame its not also on the Fuze] So, as an alternative to using the scroll wheel for accelerated song etc. scrolling it strikes me that linking this desirable feature to the top and bottom buttons would be an ideal means of adopting it - the scroll wheel could then be used for fixed speed scrolling -  May be easier than reinventing the wheel…!  Very pleased to hear that Sansa is working on this.  N.B. - if you are listening, Sansa, we really really need this upgrade to the firmware for _ both _the Fuze and E200 series.

Message Edited by Shimbo on 11-16-2008 12:06 AM

My apologies I am so used to the E200 I forgot that the bottom button on the Fuze works in a different way - so whilst this would work on the E200s maybe not on the Fuze - keep up the good work on reinventing the wheel…

Shimbo

Message Edited by Shimbo on 11-16-2008 12:19 AM

19

Right now you can get the list of songs by an artist by choosing the artist, play all, then click the 6 oclock postion on the wheel and choose back to music list. What really bugs me about this is that the songs aren’t in alphabetical order. One can use the play all then back to music list to also get to the song list for a genre.

Message Edited by JK98 on 11-16-2008 12:11 AM

20

Wouldn’t mind also a bit of quicker scrolling - as it is it is still a bit slow, in my opinion.  And/Or perhaps the ability to set the speed of the scroll in the ‘Settings’ area. THANKS!