DICE iPod unit playlist navigation mode

I've heard a number of people gripe about the playlist navigation in the DICE iPod unit, and have found it a bit lacking myself. So I decided to come up with a solution. Here's what I did:

1. Create your XYZ playlist.
2. Go to this website: http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
3. Enter some text to introduce your playlist, I used "This is the XYZ playlist."
4. Click Download.
5. Drag the wav file into iTunes and rename it to "!! XYZ Playlist".
6. If your playlist is a manual playlist, drag this file into it. Otherwise add it to a smart playlist by using the "Name is '!! XYZ Playlist'" condition.
7. Sort the playlist by name.

Now the "!! XYZ Playlist" file will be the first file in the playlist. So when you're navigating through playlists in CD 2 mode, the playlist filename will show on the display since it's the first file. And it will give you an audio cue while you're driving so you don't need to take your eyes off the road.

 

Someone had mentioned in another DICE thread that this trick isn't working anymore. I hadn't resync'd my iPod in a while, but I see now they're right. It looks like Apple has changed their sorting routines to sort letters before numbers or symbols, so the "!! ...whatever..." naming convention winds up on the bottom. Oddly enough, if the numbers or symbols FOLLOW a letter, they then sort to the top of that letter group. Long story short, took a bit of fiddling, but I found if you replace my original filename prefix suggestion of "!!" with "A___" it seems to function back the way we want.

EDIT: Correction. More accurately, it seems to sort items starting with symbols as if the symbols weren't there. So "!! B..." would sort in with the B's...