Say I'm riding with someone new and they are in the mood for a particular type of music. Sorry, you'll have to look through my 4000 track collection after every song you play because you can't make a playlist now.

Oh, that! That's no big deal. You don't need to create playlists for your passenger to hear the music he wants. He just does a search. It'll create an ad-hoc playlist with the results of your search. You can search by title, artist, genre, year, or album. You just can't search on multiple combined permutations of those things at the same time.

So if you're listening to Morrisey and your passenger wants to hear some industrial, he just does a genre search on "industrial" and he's happy. Or if your passenger specifically wants Nine Inch Nails, he can search on that, too. Quite easily, in fact.

What he can't do is create a complex-filtered ad-hoc playlist combining hip-hop tracks with Industrial music from 1993 recorded on clear nights when the moon is full. Only simple one-parameter searches can be done from the remote control.

Say that I was in the mood for the Beatles and the album "Talk Show" (by Talk Show) because I wanted to see the influence the Beatles had on the band. I could create a playlist with a Beatles album and the Talk Show album and then randomize it.

You can do that right now. Works like a charm. Just tried it. But as I just reported in the Bug Reports forum, the feature has a minor bug in 11a. I'm sure it will be fixed soon, though...

Assuming the bug is fixed, here is what you'd do. Let's assume you're already playing a playlist of only "Beatles" tracks (whether it's a pre-created "Beatles" playlist or whether it was done with a "Search By Artist" doesn't matter). Go into the "Search by Artist" feature and hit the "CD-MD CH" button to switch it from "Search By Artist" to "Append By Artist". Locate "Talk Show" and hit DNPP. Bam- you've now got a combined Beatles/TalkShow playlist playing.

Right now, when I tried it, it induced the bug, but the bug is really minor: it just interrupts the current song, reshuffles the playlist, and plays a random song from the middle of the playlist. But the contents of the playlist are correct now. In my case I started a "Yes" playlist, then added all of my "Aimee Mann" tracks to it. It's now shuffling Aimee Mann songs with Yes songs. An odd combination, but hey, the feature works.

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Tony Fabris