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Song Sift, an application by Inedible Software, is available for 99 US cents at the App Store.
It's been about a decade since the first practical MP3 players started popping up, and 10 years is plenty of time to collect a positively bloated library of digital music.
Perhaps you got in at the ground floor with Napster in '99 and loaded up on free tunes before the music industry (and, just maybe, your own conscience) decided to do something about it. Maybe you remain a proud pirate, Bay or no Bay. Or perhaps one lonely weekend in 2006 you went to a quiet, dark place and set about ripping every single CD, cassette, record album and 8-track tape you've ever owned. However you get it, it's now possible to carry it all on the hard drive of a small laptop.
But for a lot of sonic pack rats, even the best iPod touch out there still doesn't offer enough space to cram in your full library. It currently maxes out at 64 GB, and that's big, but it's not I've-been-guzzling-MP3s-since-before-Metallica-sued-its-first-university big, especially when you also want to carry around a nice selection of apps and movies. The biggest iPhone holds half that much data, plus you've got to leave room for photos and recorded videos.
If your MP3 closet is bigger than your iPod suitcase, the easiest solution is to just use iTunes' Autofill feature and let the program fill the device will a random grab-bag from your general library or a selected playlist. Of course, this gives you an incomplete menu of songs, and in many cases you'll only have a fragment of an album or one or two songs from any given artist -- not an ideal situation for certain listening moods.
If this annoys you terribly, and you're willing to spend a buck to make it all go away, Song Sift is your answer.
Sorting and Sifting
Song Sift acts as an additional organization tool for the music player function on an iPod touch or iPhone. Whereas the built-in iPod app on the device lets you organize by artist, playlist, album, genre, song, etc., Song Sift lets you sort your music by artist, album, or artist by album while specifying the minimum number of songs each result should have in order to show up on the list. Select a category along the white-on-black icons at the bottom, set the slider up top to your minimum song count (maxes out at 10), and you'll get a narrowed-down list.
For example, if you push the slider all the way over to 10 and select Artists, the list will scale down to show you only artists who have 10 or more songs on your iPod right now.
Luckily, you don't have to somehow memorize this information, shut down Song Sift, and open up the iPod function. Nope, you can just play a song directly from Song Sift using built-in controls. The control scheme is familiar: next track, last track, play, pause and volume. Double-tap the Home button to bring the controls up, and hit the "iPod" button if you want to go over to the actual iPod app -- it'll flip you over there without interrupting the music.
Once you're using the iPod app, though, your narrowed-down list of well-stocked albums and artists is gone, and all the music on the device is once again displayed.
Bottom Line
Even though it's a pretty simple app, it's hard to find much of a fault with Song Sift. It performs a function that would be nice to see in the actual iPod application that's baked into the touch and the iPhone. For some picky music fans, sorting through the device's library and trying to find an album that has more than two or three songs might be really frustrating, and if you're one of those fans, Song Sift only charges a buck to make life easier.
The only annoyance I found with Song Sift was that it seemed to want to re-analyze my entire on-device library each time I started it up, which usually took several seconds. It might be nice if the app could be made to store that information and re-update only after I've done another sync or downloaded new songs over the air from iTunes. Still, it's not really a deal-breaker, and since I tested this app on an iPhone 3G, I'm willing to believe 3GS users may not encounter the same drag.
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