I've had my iPod Shuffle for about 5 days now. I love it. It's very easy to use and easy to keep up with. It's not really something you understand until you hold one in your hand. It helps that it's not tethered to a table by some security cable…
The thing that confuses me though is that 100% of the time I have used "autofill" to fill it up, which seems great.
Apple included a little "autofill" button when the iPod is mounted so that iTunes can just go grab a bunch of tunes at random (from the selected playlist, of course, don't want to be too random…) and shove 'em on the player.
The sad thing is, now that I've resync'd it 5 or 6 times, hitting the autofill button each time, on 4 separate occasions, autofill has tried to put one more song on it than would fit.
Come on Apple, it's a completely closed system. Why does it try to put one song too many on the iPod.
Normally, I wouldn't care. But I also use iTunes as my alarm clock. Every morning at 7:30 an applescript launches into the party shuffle playlist and wakes me up with random music. Much better than the radio, I don't have to listen to right-wing banter of the yes-on-36 DJ's and don't have to hear the songs I don't like – they all come from my collection (and my playlist is much larger than local radio's playlists).
Now the problem is this: Even though Mac OS X is multi threaded Unix, iTunes has a couple of MODAL dialogs that KEEP IT FROM WORKING WHEN THEY ARE DISPLAYED ON THE SCREEN. How stupid is that?
If iTunes is already playing a song when the dialog pops up, it will finish the song and then wait for me to press OK. There are a couple of other conditions that spring up modal dialogs, and I've learned to carefully avoid them.
Imagine your alarm clock doesn't come on because it's waiting for you to hit "ok" before it will start playing a new tune. This happens to me.
Stupid stuipid stupid. Worthy of Mac OS 7, maybe, but not OS X. So, Apple, please either fix the "one too many songs" issue in autofill, or make the modal dialogs go away and replace them with good citizens like sheets or something that will allow other things in the program to continue unabated.
Why should an alert telling me about syncing to an iPod keep iTunes from playing the next song? I still want to hear the music…
2 Comments
i have an promblem with my ipod shuffle. But i love it!!!
well my brother has an ipod and i hv an ipod shuffle.
the problem is that we can't keep our songs separate from eachother……..
i really need help!!
please if you hv any thoughts on it please email me…
thank you!!
rhea
The only *easy* way I can think of to keep your brother's tunes separate from your own is to put your name in the comments of each of your songs.
then you can make a smart playlist that includes all the songs with your name in the comments.
then use that playlist to sync to the iPod shuffle.
it's not perfect, but it'll work.
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in addition, you could uncheck all your songs and then make sure that the settings for his iPod are set to sync checked songs only. That way he'd get only his songs.
used in combination (and making sure your iPod is not set to sync checked songs only) then you would both only get the songs you want.
finally, if there are any tunes you both want, make sure your name is in the comments of the song *and* that it's checked. That way, iTunes will stuff it on both iPods…
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does this help? If you need specific instructions more than this, let me know.