Why can't I see full artist, album, title info at a glance?

I’ve got mostly classical music on my Fuze, which means that the Artist, Album, and Title info are often pretty long. I’d like an option to see all of that info at a glance. As it is now, I have to wait for each one to scroll through (first the artist, then the album, then the title) which can take a loong time. It seems like there should be a basic function that would show all this, i.e. get rid of the album art and fit the whole artist, title, etc on one screen. Is this option there, and I just have not found it yet?

No there’s not.  But it’s a good idea.   Being able to make the tag info full screen the same way you can make the album art full screen (more or less) would be nice.

The scroll speed could definitely be bumped up a little bit. But I like the idea of flashing the title full screen like the album art better. SanDisk tried (woefully) to help this situation by condensing the fonts so that there is essentially no space between the words of the Artist, Album etc. so you get something like this:

CreedenceClearwaterRevival

ChronicleVol.1

Lookin’OutMyBackDoor

or

HerbAlpert&TheTijuanaBrass

TheLonelyBull

A QuietTear(LagrimaQuieta)

Granted you can edit the ID3 tags to abbreviate and or somehow shorten the different field lengths, but that’s a work-a-round. Faster scrolling and/or full screen title display would be the best.

Classical music is a real pain to manage using tags. Sometimes for example the artist might be listed as Mozart, while at other times it might be listed as NY Philharmonic. What is really needed is two tags, composer and performer. 

PS. I thought about this again, and there really isn’t any good answer except to have two separate tags, one for composer and one for performer. Someone mentioned that there is an extra tag, album artist, but it isn’t supported by the Fuze. I guess someone could use the genre tag for the composer, and the artist tag for the performer. This would still allow classical music to be segregated from the rock music by having it in the audiobook or podcast folder(the other could be used for both audiobooks and podcasts), the only problem with this is that it can’t be used for files on the micro SD card, since the genre must be audiobook or podcast to get the files into those areas of the player. If one has a mixture of rock music and classical, they could put the rock music on the card, so room is freed in the internal memory to use the audiobook or podcast folder for classical music.

It seems like most mp3 player designers think an mp3 player will only be used to play rock music at 128 kbps. At least the Fuze will play back low bitrate files. The autobookmarking for podcasts and audiobooks is a start, however it requires the person to remember which podcast they were in the middle of before listening to some music. It seems like a return to podcast and return to audiobook function would be the proper way to address this.

Message Edited by JK98 on 09-24-2008 11:52 AM

Message Edited by JK98 on 09-24-2008 12:21 PM

I feel your pain. Classical ‘tagging’ definitely takes some ‘creative engineering’. You’re right, sometimes the tag info indicates the artist (like Mozart or Beethoven) but more often than not, it shows the actual artist performing the piece such as The New York Philharmonic Orchestra or something similar. And the “2nd movement in E minor etude blah, blah, blah” title I usually abbreviate as much as I can. The backlight is going to go off before half of that scrolls across the screen anyway. :stuck_out_tongue:

What makes the  tag system so horrible is for example that NY Philharmonic could be listed as NY Philharmonic, The New York Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and several other slight variations which will cause the player to not group them together.

Thanks for the replies, folks. Looks like I’ll be putting a new feature request in on the appropriate forum.

@jk98 wrote:

Classical music is a real pain to manage using tags. Sometimes for example the artist might be listed as Mozart, while at other times it might be listed as NY Philharmonic. What is really needed is two tags, composer and performer. Perhaps for classical the artist tag should be used for composer, and the album tag for performer? Of course this would involve plenty of tag editing, but the artist tag seems to either show the composer or performer.

In this case I usually use Album Artist for the composer and Artist for the performer.  I do the same for tribute albums: Album Artist for the band/artist to whom the tribute is dedicated and artist for the band/artist performing the tribute.  Same for compilations: Album Artist = Various Artists, Artist = performer of individual song.

This works great in tools like Winamp where you can group by Album Artist to see all your Motzart together or group by Artist to get all your NY Philharmonic together.  Best of both worlds.

Of course, it doesn’t help much with the Fuze since it doesn’t support Album Artist.  There have been some requests for this mainly to help deal with compilations, but it would help in these other scenarios as well.  Hopefully an Album Artist browse will be implemented eventually.

I would prefer to have the Fuze display the composer, performer, and title rather than performer, album, and title. Would it be possible to use (for example) the Advanced Tag Editor in WIndows Media Player to change the text in the appropriate boxes to get the display I want?