Right - the new shuffle is pretty nifty. I get to walk around wearing white earphones and looking like a complete prat - but I still give those nods of recognition to the cute (female before ANYONE says anything) joggers who run past with their white headphones, making me feel like part of some increasingly large club. One of the problems I have is that my head is ludicrously deformed. Not in the obvious way, but more in the fact that my ears just refuse to hold the earphones in there - they keep falling out. The foam thingies (technical term) on the earphones help out a bit by using friction to hold them in, but any slight tug on the cord, and those ear-plugs come flying out. I may have to resort to the trusty headphones soon.

One really annoying thing about the shuffle is that you must have your entire music library present on your syncing machine. If you don't, iTunes will happily remove all the songs on your shuffle which it thinks shouldn't belong there. Without asking. This, of course, won't do for me, as I keep my entire music library stored on a central server, and then connect to it when I'm at home. So it's really lucky that I came across this gem of a script - the iPod Shuffle database rebuilder. Basically what you do is drag and drop your files onto the shuffle via the finder, and then just run the database rebuilding script. It'll search for all files, and then create the iTunes playlists for them. Now here's where the really cool bit comes in. You can have two separate playlists - one for the shuffle mode and one for the straight play mode. So naturally, I create the "Albums" and "Shuffle" directories. You can add rules for which playlists you add files to, so I say that all albums are in regular mode, and anything in Shuffle is in shuffle mode. Now I can switch between listening to Albums and random music with a flick of a switch. If I can get symlinks working between files in the Albums directory and the Shuffle directory, I should be able to take songs from Albums, and add them to the shuffle mode playlists without taking up extra disk space. You can keep the script on your iPod, so that you can do this at any computer that you want to copy music off. Update - Symlinks are now working, hit the shuffle hacks page for the info.

But what about the touted ease of use and functionality of iTunes!? How about using that nifty Autofill feature with music you just happen to have lying around? I think these two methods are both compatible. Simply Autofill the shuffle with a bit of music, and then quit iTunes. Run the rebuild-db script, and your filled songs will magically appear on the shuffle.