Hi all,

I've finally gotten around to ripping the classical music of my collection, and discovered that the names are very, very long. For example, I'll have tags that look like this:

Artist: Mozart

Title : Symphony 39 in E Flat Major, KV543 / First Movement: Adagio - Allegro

Album : Symphonies 34, 35 "Haffner", 39 / Mozart Symphony Players / Whoever the conductor is

My playlists are setup like:

Mozart

   +- Symphony 39 in E Flat Major

        +- (songs)

The problem with this is that when scrolling through the playlist menu on the player, I can't see the entire title of the songs, because they're so long. The first part of the song title made redundant by the way I have my playlists, but I like this setup for the way info is scrolled when the song plays (since the playlist isn't part of the info). I'd like to be able to shorten the song names in the playlist, so as I go through the playlists, I can select: Mozart->Symphony 39->First Movement.

So the question is (and I haven't been able to do this in any of my experimentation): is it possible for the song name, as seen in the playlist, be different from the song title in the tag? If so, how?

According to emptool, the 'rename' command works on both playlists and songs. I can change the name of the song with it, but on sync, it gets reset to what it was before. The only way I can change a song title in JEmplode is through the properties dialog, which changes the tag info, which I don't want to do.

Thanks for any suggestions,

is it possible for the song name, as seen in the playlist, be different from the song title in the tag?

If by "tag" you mean the empeg database entry associated with that song, then no. The song name as seen in the playlist -IS- the song title, they are one and the same thing.

You could work around it by making hierarchical playlists with each song in its own playlist. Then the song title could be different than the playlist which housed the song. Sounds a bit too cumbersome for my tastes, though.

You're not the only person to discover that the title/artist/album layout isn't very well suited to classical music. Ask Doug Burnside how he handles it, he even uses V1 tags (30 chars) and he's come to grips with it.

Ask Doug Burnside how he handles it,

"Ask and ye shall receive..."

Probably what I do won't be what you want, but for what it's worth, here it is.

I use much less elaborate song titles. In your example, my song title would be simply:

Mozart-Symphony #39 1st mvt.

The reason I incorporate the composer name in the title is... otherwise I would have dozens of identical song titles. I mean, how many "Symphony #3 2nd Mvt" are there?

For the remainder of the information you have in your title, I just use the "Comments" field (or whatever it is called) and if I ever need to know who the conductor and orchestra etc. are, I just use the full info-display screen on the Rio.

tanstaafl.

You could work around it by making hierarchical playlists with each song in its own playlist. Then the song title could be different than the playlist which housed the song. Sounds a bit too cumbersome for my tastes, though.

Actually, I like that suggestion. My classical collection is pretty piddling at the moment, so it wouldn't take long to do. If it was any larger, perl and emptool could take care of it. I'm not concerned about the extra button click it would create in navigation -- I'm not so discerning that I know I want to listen to a particular movement, I'd just play the whole symphony. I like being able to scroll through and go "oh, there's three movements, called x, y, and z" when I select a particular symphony.

Thanks,

"Ask and ye shall receive..."

I didn't (yet), but thanks for chiming in.

I use much less elaborate song titles.[...]For the remainder of the information you have in your title, I just use the "Comments" field

That's in the same vein as what I'm trying. I thought about using the comment field, but decided against it on account of laziness -- I know I'd never look at it when I'm driving. I want the info scrolling in the title and album where I can see it, so I can try and learn a bit about what I'm listening to, without making a concious effort at it.

Cheers,