B129 ARC CarPlay: Selecting by Artist

Early Access
#1

I’m having trouble figuring out why ARC does not provide some way to get to artists quickly through the CarPlay interface. Apple and Plex both provide access to an A–Z alphabet, so finding Youssou N’Dour or Warren Zevon is a couple of quick presses, and maybe two of three swipes.

There are about 1800 artists in my library. With 4.5 artists displayed per screen, that’s 400 screens to get to the end of the alphabet — i.e., essentially impossible. The only workaround I see is to pick up my phone and execute a search that way — and eliminating the need to pick up my phone is pretty much the entire point of CarPlay, isn’t it?

This is not a bug. This is an essential but missing component of navigation in ARC. You could just relabel the “Artists” tab to “Artists Beginning With A.”

I’ve been wrong before, so If I’m missing something, by all means let me know. Otherwise, I’m really bewildered by this oversight or, worse, intentional omission. It renders CarPlay largely unusable for me.

2 Likes
#2

I’ve made this request multiple times. I hope Roon is working on it, but IDK. We need A to Z for artist and albums. My albums sorted by artist only take me to the B’s and that’s after an unacceptable amount of scrolling.

1 Like
#3

I agree it would be nice. Hopefully it’s something they are working on for future updates.
I am happy about what we have so far but this would be a very welcome addition since it’s not possible to go through Siri either. I hate voice commands myself so having an option to select manually would be appreciated.

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#4

Thanks for the suggestions :slight_smile: Both Siri and the alphabetical indexer would make things easier to navigate and we’re looking into building them. The alphabetical indexer was something that proved to be deceptively hard to build, so we opted to focus on other features, bug squashing, and getting this first Carplay iteration out the door.

We will be continuing to improve on both Carplay and Android Auto over time, and both of these features are high on our list of future improvements.

4 Likes
#5

Yeah, it just doesn’t feel like CarPlay integration is really finished if it’s not practical to select a specific artist.

Thanks for the reply.