I always have Shuffle turned on in the Settings menu. Only once in a rare while do I want to turn it off, usually to listen to a whole album or something. If I want to do that, I need to go into the Settings menu and hit ‘shuffle’ past ‘Albums’ (which always seems to take a long time, hmm) until it’s at ‘off’. Then back up, navigate to what I want, etc. Usually this happens while I’m driving. (For this, a Radio Shack #17-548 is a godsend.)

I’d hoped that the improvement would simply bump the Shuffle setting (off / songs / albums) up to the main menu, if the user wants it there. But that’s not what they did.

Instead, there is just a ‘shuffle songs’ command. Which is fairly useless, since I already have them shuffled. Oh, and it’s like hitting ‘play’, too. But it doesn’t appear to correspond to the Shuffle setting in the menu. If I have Shuffle (setting) turned ‘off’, then I hit ‘shuffle songs’ in the main menu, the songs DO randomize. The little crossed-arrows icon appears. But I go to the menu setting and … it still says ‘Off’ !!! (WTF?) Dumb, not consistent.

I, for one, would like for one or both of the following:

1) Real shuffle setting in main menu (off / songs / albums)
2) Play an Entire Album: command, which lets you browse to an album, then sticks all of its tracks ahead of the rest of the ones currently in the shuffled order.

I have tried resetting the unit to see if this cleared it, nope. Still the same dumb behavior.

(Oh, and for it to randomize the albums on its own time, so the menu setting is a bit more snappy.)

(Oh yeah, and… while I’m at it, I wish that when I set the Backlight setting to ‘always’, it would remember the STATE that *I* left it in, eg so it’s either ALWAYS ON, or ALWAYS OFF, toggled by holding the Menu key like always.)

(Now I can’t stop. I also wish there were a different shuffle icon for Albums. And that you could toggle between shuffle modes with another key combo, like forward and back at the same time. But I’m not sure if that’d be possible on all models.. would it? Ho hum.)

I really ought to just post this rant, or some version of it, to my own blog. ;)

I know everyone’s probably heard about Apple’s revamped iPod line. They’ve added a new 6GB iPod Mini, increased the iPod Mini battery life to 18 hours, lowered the price on the 4GB iPod Mini, 20GB iPod, and all iPod Photos….

glad to have you aboard!

cl