Tip: Use the Hierarchy To Your Advantage

[Adam Krebs]

<p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/zt/auto/1221770037.usr495.jpg" border="1" /></p><p>Never one to do things the easy way, the Zune team came up with their own unique way to handle song organization; where each song belongs to an album, and each album belongs to one artist. But while this method of organizing enables advanced manipulation of songs, artists, and albums, its complexity can be confusing to new users who may be more&nbsp;familiar with a more straightforward implementation like those found in iTunes and Windows Media Player.</p><p>The default ("Artist")&nbsp;view of the&nbsp;Zune client app organizes your collection into a three-pane&nbsp;hierarchy of Artist-Album-Song, with songs being the most basic level on the right of the screen. Selecting an artist or group of artists filters the Album pane down to show&nbsp;only albums by those artists. Similarly, selecting an album or group of albums will only show songs from those albums in the Song pane. The advantage of organizing your collection in&nbsp;this way is to allow you to use artists and albums as song groups: an Album can have multiple songs each with their own genre, and an Artist can have multiple songs each with their own contributing artist. <MORE /></p><p>So let's say you're browsing around an artist or a group of albums and you want to return to the full list of all your songs, albums, and artists. All you have to do is click anywhere or on anything in one of the three panes&nbsp;and hit the <strong>Escape (Esc)</strong><strong> </strong>key on your keyboard.</p><p>In another scenario, you are looking at an artist with several albums. When you select one of them, the song field is going to narrow down to only show songs from that album. But if you want the full list of songs by that artist to show up again, place your mouse in the Album pane, and click on a background area that&nbsp;isn't occupied by an album&nbsp;(a "blank" area). This "blank area" trick works in the artist field too, but it's a little more difficult to accomplish.</p><p>Hopefully now you're a little more familiar with how the Zune software operates and organizes songs. Got a tip? Post it in the forum or <a href="http://www.zunethoughts.com/contact" target="_blank">contact us</a>.</p>

[jm]

Never one to do things the easy way, the Zune team came up with their own unique way to handle song organization; where each song belongs to an album, and each album belongs to one artist. But while this method of organizing enables advanced manipulation of songs, artists, and albums, its complexity can be confusing to new users who may be more familiar with a more straightforward implementation like those found in iTunes and Windows Media Player.


In the software, this works for genre, too. Choose a genre on the left, it shows the albums that contain the genre in the center and the songs that caused the album to pop up on the right. Nice. On the other hand, on the Zune itself this won't work at all. If you select a genre, the album pops up but when you go to the album, all the songs for the album are shown not the ones that belong to the genre. I've edited my mp3 collection of world music to indicate country of origin of the artist in the genre field. If you have a compilation album with songs from Ukraine, France, Tuva, etc. and you select the Ukraine genre, the album name pops up. If you select the album then you get all the songs, not just the one with the Ukraine genre. And because for whatever reason the Zune doesn't show any song information except album and artist, you can't tell which song comes from Ukraine once you've drilled down. Pretty useless.

Jonathan

[jm]

I wrongly singled out the Zune device for screwing up lists by genre. In fact, the software gets it wrong, too. And for artists as well.

Basically, the Zune is really pretty bad for compilation albums as far as finding individual tracks. The problem is that album is a derived notion. That is, you construct a list of albums based on the data that is encoded in individual song files. As such, albums don't have genres themselves and any management program that pretends that they do is going to get stuff wrong unless that program does the extra work to make sure that it's being consistent. The Zune pretends that albums have genres, but then when you select the album it shows all the songs instead of doing the (arguably) correct next step and filtering the songs as well.

The situation for artists also comes out wrong, and maybe even worse, because if you click on the artist in the left column, the only albums which appear in the middle column are those which include songs for which the artist is listed as 'album artist' and not 'song artist'. This means that no compilation album on which this artist appears will show up, unless you've done something silly like make the albumartist the same as the song artist. This is silly because if you do it, then when you go to album view, you'll end up with as many entries for the same album as you have songs on the album.

Jonathan