[ctrlz]

Originally Posted by Walkure

No. You listened to them in a certain way because the technology of listening to music 30+ years ago left you no choice. After enough listens your brain was programmed to expect the songs in a certain order.

Sometimes artists were passionate about a certain order, sometimes they didn't care, and sometimes technology dictated a certain outcome. Unfortunately this ends up being left to speculation in most cases. But some artists have revised running order of famous albums to reflect their original intent. One example: Peter Gabriel "so" now has "in your eyes" as the closing track. Too much bass for an inner groove in the old days. Gabriel is adamant it was always intended as the closer. And he could care less about people who are used to the original running order.

[Norm Peterson]

Originally Posted by ember1205

In the case of taking longer drives / trips, much like you would be selecting certain CD's to load into a changer or to plan on listening to, you could very easily copy those albums to a SD Card or USB Drive.

I don't doubt that the copy procedure itself is easy enough, but it'd be one more thing I'd have to fit into the schedule of getting ready, and it's not something amenable to being done inside the last hour before leaving (like I'm apt to leave the music selection to - sometimes that little task even gets left for the last few minutes).

Folder structure would be Artist\Album\Tracks and browsing or playing an album start to finish requires little tinkering.

I understand the concept of folder structure well enough (I've had a PC since the days when DOS 3.3 was cutting edge and I was writing batch files for it).

It's the matter of having to tinker through a menu structure and a display screen to actually use what I copied that'd be the problem. I use head unit displays and menus at truly minimal levels as it is - let's just say I won't drive while wearing my reading glasses and leave it at that.

Once your entire library is digital, it's really easy to wipe out a drive and copy on what you want for the trip. The tricky part is Playlists as those have to be built each time and can be tedious to do. As far as grabbing albums in their entirety, the prep would take five minutes or less.

Playlists would be a hard no, a total non-starter. 5 minutes is probably all I spend now on choosing what to bring, so there's no gain to be had there.

For you, where you listen in alphabetical order, you can just copy everything to drives / SD cards and leave them in the car, bringing a drive in only when you need to add content to one of them because you bought something new.

I only use alphabetical order at home, but it involves (randomly) the family room system, the garage system, and the Discman. There's a box or two as well, though I haven't used them in years. None of these devices have their own internal storage, or SD card / external storage capability.


Norm

[ember1205]

Originally Posted by Norm Peterson

I understand the concept of folder structure well enough (I've had a PC since the days when DOS 3.3 was cutting edge and I was writing batch files for it).

My experience goes back at least that far as well. Boy, things are different and yet there's so much history in the various limitations we still deal with!

Originally Posted by Norm Peterson

It's the matter of having to tinker through a menu structure and a display screen to actually use what I copied that'd be the problem. Let's just say I won't drive while wearing my reading glasses (so I use head unit displays at a truly minimal level) and leave it at that.

I can appreciate this. Not only does a lot of this require taking your eyes off of the road, but the menus straight-up suck. UX design is such a major weakness that I honestly don't understand why SOMEONE hasn't really changed the game with clean and useful interface. Why is the auto volume control in the Apps menu? That makes no sense to me at all...

What about using voice controls instead? Just a thought as that also seems to be a weak area but might at least be a -little- better. And, I generally hate playlists as well, at least when having to make them by hand like for the car on a USB drive. Making them in iTunes was pretty easy and sync'ing it all to an iPod was also simple. Now that Apple has basically killed off iTunes on the Mac, I no longer have an interest in trying to use an old iPod Touch in my cars...