Playlist question: Menus differ from manual

[tandemfahrer]

Hi there, I really love my Archos Jukebox Recorder (originally  6 GB, upgraded to 20 GB), which I installed in my car. Combined with speech support it is about the only safe solution for navigating tons of music while driving.

However, I am having problems creating playlists: The Rockbox menus my unit shows differ from the ones shown in the manual (e.g. 'playlist' submenu only has one entry for 'insert', nothing else; 'view current playlist' in the 'playlist options' menu accessed from the main menu does not do anything). I just upgraded to Rockbox 3.3.

Is there something I am doing wrong? I tried following the manual, which is only half-written concerning playlists, and I found it to be confusing. Is there not a way to compile playlists on the PC via an easy-to-use graphic interface and then just copy them to the Archos.

I fear that my questions might seem trivial to people living with the players 24/7  . However, most of the music I hear outside the car still comes from CDs or even vinyl, so please help me out even if I might be a bit behind times.

Thanks a lot,
Chris

[Chronon]

Very strange.  It would be good to hear about whether other users of this device notice these issues or if they're peculiar to something in your setup.  You say you just upgraded to Rockbox 3.3.  What version were you using before that?  Perhaps some inconsistent settings are causing some problem.  You could try resetting them according to the instructions in the manual and see if it improves things.

Yes, you can use any software you like to browse the files on your player and build a standard .m3u playlist.  You could also browse a file tree on your computer to generate the playlist so long as Rockbox can reconstruct the local path by trimming directories from the left of the path -- for example Rockbox could truncate C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\Music\Artist\Album\Track.mp3  to \Music\Artist\Album\Track.mp3 and successfully find music on your player.

When the behavior of your player doesn't match what's in the documentation then this is generally a good time to speak up.   

[pixelma]

Tandemfahrer: to me it sounds like you don't have something playing yet, correct?

If so invoking the context menu (and then choosing "Playlist" on a single track only gives the option of insert. Doing this on a folder gives you two options: insert and insert shuffled. All the other insert and queue options described in the manual are available if you already have music playing (an active playlist) and then go to the file browser to add songs or folders to it.

The easiest way to create a playlist is just to "click" on the first track in the folder you want to hear. Rockbox creates a dynamic playlist with all the songs in that folder starting with the chosen track. If you enable the "Recursively insert directories" option.

If you start with the "Creating playlists" chapter, together with this small note you're hopefully able to get used to it. I guess it could be made more clear in the manual, if you have any suggestions how to improve, feel free to post them. There should be no differences to other players' behaviour by the way.