How easy is navigating a large music library?

[mcdj]

I'm supposed to meet up with someone tomorrow to buy a 160GB ATV. I don't want to make a big mistake. My girlfriend is already giving me grief that the ATV would basically make my Arcam Solo/RDock combo a glorified integrated amp (and I've already got a separate power amp, so the Arcam would become a $2000 volume knob with a CD player/tuner I don't use.)

I have 70GB of music...about 12K songs from 3K artists. It's my understanding that there is no search function for the music library, and no pop-up alphabet like on an iPod.

So, just how navigable will 70 gigs of music be? I don't want to be scrolling forever.

Currently, using the Arcam Solo, with my iPod attached, the screen is tiny, but at least I can type in numbers on the remote...if I want to get to (a range of) artists that start with the letter "S", I type 777. This takes me to the 777th artist in the list, or in my case, Steely Dan. It's not the prettiest method, but based on what I've read about ATV, it seems like it might be faster than an ATV. Movies and TV are nice and all, but I would be using the ATV for music 99.9% of the time.

Should I skip the ATV, keep the GF happy and pi** off the person I told I would buy the ATV from, or go for the ATV and pray it doesn't drive me insane looking for a song that starts with Z?

Any advice mucho appreciated.

mcdj

 

[Jeff Hall]

I've got 8700+ songs in my library. I search by Genre->Artist->Album->Song.

They'll likely add manual search in a future update (unless it's already there, I can't remember).

 

[MikieMikie]

It's relatively easy to find an artist/song/album combo. It's not like you're going to have to scroll endlessly.

A few things to remember:
1. The scrolling accelerates, so it takes less time to travel further.
2. There is no letter search.

You can navigate by artist, album, playlist, etc. Whether that is sufficient for you is something no one but you can answer. I would suggest you look at it before buying, if possible. You don't need more than a few dozen tunes on it to see the way the menus work. An Apple store or any other store will have it set up so you can experience the menus.

 

[mcdj]

It's relatively easy to find an artist/song/album combo. It's not like you're going to have to scroll endlessly.

A few things to remember:
1. The scrolling accelerates, so it takes less time to travel further.
2. There is no letter search.

You can navigate by artist, album, playlist, etc. Whether that is sufficient for you is something no one but you can answer. I would suggest you look at it before buying, if possible. You don't need more than a few dozen tunes on it to see the way the menus work. An Apple store or any other store will have it set up so you can experience the menus.

Thanks. Exactly the info I was after.

 

[IdiddidI]

I've got 8700+ songs in my library. I search by Genre->Artist->Album->Song.

I have a 330 GB library of music, and this is the most efficient way to navigate IF you are anal about tagging genres (it's made me clean mine up).

I'm really hoping they implement music searching in a future version--or better yet, a remote with a scroll wheel.

 

[Jeff Hall]

I have a 330 GB library of music, and this is the most efficient way to navigate IF you are anal about tagging genres (it's made me clean mine up).

I'm really hoping they implement music searching in a future version--or better yet, a remote with a scroll wheel.

Well I've imported my entire collection from CDs, so everything's already tagged. Only thing extra I did was download missing artwork. With the Amazon Artwork widget or google image search.

 

[mallbritton]

I have almost 11,000 tracks by over 800 artists in my library. In my opinion, another important point that makes navigation easy on TV is good tags.

If your ID3 tags are wrong, or incomplete then finding what you want can be a real problem. So make sure your tags are up to date and you shouldn't have any trouble navigating.

 

[richpjr]

Do any of you with large libraries have multiple copies of the same album? I have ripped every album I own twice - one in ossless for listenting through my home stereo and one in ACC for the iPod. On my Mac, I differentiate them with smart playlists for each type. It's easy to use and sync the iPod with. On the ATV I can see the playlists, but you can't drill down easy with it, it just gives a long list of songs. A playlist with 5000+ items in it is not real useful or easy to use. Since the only time I access the ACC files is when I sync the iPod, I could put each type of file in a separate library but that's kind of a pain.

Anyone do anything similar?

 

[spacepower7]

hmm

I just got my Apple TV today.

I just realized that you can "letter search" the iTunes Music Store, but you can't "letter search" your own library. What a stupid "feature" and totally useless for me.

 

[mallbritton]

Do any of you with large libraries have multiple copies of the same album?

I don't do that. I've ripped all my commercial albums at 128-256 Kbps for syncing to my iPhone, and I keep all my live music in lossless since I generally only listen to the shows when I'm playing WoW.

Regards,
Michael