teccy.com

So I’m sat here listing to my iPod, cursing it for not having a shuffle-within-a-playlist option, and I go into the settings menu to turn of the repeat mode which was replaying podcasts that I’d just listened to (it repeats all the tracks in a playlist and if you’re up-to-date on your podcasts that might be only one file) and I notice that there’s a shuffle option which is turned off… I switch that on and now tracks in my playlist now appear in random order! You can shuffle either songs or albums which means it either plays random tracks or chooses an album and plays all the tracks in it before moving to the next album. That’s pretty good! So it seems that the iPod does do proper shuffle, at least, the latest one does. So, d’oh! I’m still going to blame apple though; if they’d included a printed manual I’d have found that. ;-)

The other problem I’ve been having, the one with iTunes claiming that my iPod has been used with another library has, I think, been fixed by plugging the iPod in, NOT starting iTunes, starting the disk management console (right-click My Computer and click Manage) and choosing a different drive letter for the iPod to use. In my case, I chose drive U: which is far enough away from the top of the alphabet to not get affected by plugging things in and using virtual drives. So far, it’s working but if that is the solution, it’s not the kind of user friendly thing you’d expect to have to do, is it? Of course, as I said before, most people won’t be adding and removing drives (virtual or otherwise) on a regular basis but that’s not really the point.

Still, if it’s now working that’s close enough. I can’t agree with this ultimate digital music player tag that the iPod has managed to grab for itself but it’s getting better. RTFM!