Having trouble organizing things on my iPod

Question

I bought the iPod Classic 80Gb last week. I am having some trouble getting everything organized. First of all, I'd like to have certain subgroups for my music. As it is now, I can select by artists or albums or genre, but I would like to have a layer above that. Right now I am 'abusing' the Genre entry for that, but there should be a better way... I have created a genre Bruce Cockburn that contains all his albums, and a few more for specific artists. All the rest is in various bigger groups called Various and Classic and Praise. This does work as I want it to, but it's a bit weird having to use Genre for this... Playlists for specific artists and groups won't work because playlists won't contain albums but EVERY song. But it does work: I have Genre on my Main menu now and when I click on it I can choose between various artists and various groups of artists and music. Still, this is not what Genre is meant for...
Another problem are movies. I can't make ANY groups with movies. They all show up in one big list, which becomes quite messy. I also have movies that belong together, like LOTR (3 movies), Beatles Anthology (8 movies) and so on. This COULD be solved at first by using playlists, but it soon became a mess in iTunes: I also have all Laurel and Hardy talkies (41) and several other short movies and they are numbered: within no time I completely lost track of what moves belonged to what 'series' because all number come after each other...
I also 'solved' this by 'abusing' the TV-programmes entry: I turned ALL movies into TV-programs because ONLY then they will show up in 1 group (when you edit the episode numbers).
Next problem was that almost all 'movies' showed up on my iPod in the wrong order (41 - 1 in stead of 1 - 41...) So I ALSO had to make playlists for EVERY movie, even single ones, in order to be able to access them easy on the iPod...
I find this al quite confusing and I am disappointed there isn't an easier way to get things done... Having to use Genre and TV-Programmes for OTHER purposes ia a pity... and a bit weird... So I'd like to know if there is a nicer way to get things done... Why can't I make my own groups or even menu-items? It ***** having to select TV-programmes to get to my movies and to choose a Genre just in order to get Bruce Cockburn...
Message was edited by: J van E

Answer 1

I wouldn't want to mess about with Genre in the way you have, but I too would like to be able to separate one or two sections of the library from everything else. My idea would run thus.
*User defined “Sources”*
Create a new playlist option flag called, perhaps, “Exclusive source”. When set this would make the playlist appear within the sources section under the built-in sources such as Music, Movies, Audiobooks etc. Any files in one of these playlists would not appear in any other source. Either regular or smart playlists could be used. This feature could be used, for example, to create separate library sections for Classical Music or Comedy. This would make it less likely that totally incongruous pieces would be thrown up during shuffle play modes as Shuffle would work within a source. Such user-defined sections should also be replicated to the iPod and would inherit the same sub-sections as Music, i.e. Cover Flow, Artist, Album, Genere etc.
I'm with you the use of TV Shows to organise videos. If you make use of the episode ID's you should be able to get them to sort in the correct order, at least under firmware 1.1.1. An earlier version sorted strictly on reverse release date. I've bought some of the Pixar videos from the iTunes store and annoyingly the *Video Kind* flag is locked, but otherwise I've been able to group and order my videos sensibly.
tt2