The main target consumer for this product will be someone who will not use a PC for music organisation. It is intended to be a simple-to-use whopping great CD-changer really. It is aimed at people who have a standard or aftermarket head unit in their car which can control a CD-changer, and would like to put all their CDs in the car. We want to try and make the main interface something suitable to this type of user and application.

The main unit of music will be the album - the user can select one or many albums to play, but not go straight to individual tracks. Whole CDs are ripped at once, so they can be categorised okay. The user can select by album name, artist name and "type". "Type" will be like CDDB genre, but the user can choose it for each CD when they rip it - the CDDB genres are too varied and ultimately not that useful. This way users can categorise music however they like. Year info was deemed too unreliable for music selection (but could still be used for ordering music).

The ordering question comes in when the user has selected multiple albums (say - all albums by "James"). Year data (if available and correct) would allow us to then give them a tour through the history of the band (More likely, it will start with a few albums without year info, and then order the rest), or we could use a more arbitrary alphabetical list. Most users may not realise what they are getting!

For these users, I want to try and make a good guess at what will confuse/annoy them the least!

The complication starts to come in, when people add their own, already-ripped and tagged files. The easiest way for most would be to put in their MP3-CDs and let the unit copy them across. This will give us the same issues as an emplode-like transfer (although I reckon the average emplode user is actually more likely to have sanitised their ID3 tags).

With an MP3-CD transfer we could either use the ID3 tags for each track as they are (and probably have a lot of effectively one track albums) or we could do a few things to keep the same spirit of the album as the unit of music and try not to end up with a huge list of artists/albums. The user would have to compile the MP3-CD with it in mind, but we could use folders as album names (allows them to create their own compilation albums easily) or similar schemes. Do we think the average user of this sort of product will be happier to make CDs using the file structure to categorise the music, or to make sure all their ID3 tags are correct?

The emplode user is the trickiest - I would like to leave this option there for those who want to use it. I think that artist and album tags are likely to be reliable, so the music selection side shouldn't be too affected - although the implementation of the "type" idea needs to be considered. If it is only the play order that is affected, it may be something we have to work around.

Of course, there is always the option of advanced or hidden menus that allow the user to select between all these different ways of doing things.....