My iPod shuffle 1 gb has arrived! The little green box is awesome and amazing. It felt so good to hold it and feel its weight and quality that I didn't want to open it since then the box wouldn't ever be as it was again.
But, I needed to get the iPod shuffle out to free it to be musical. I immediately plugged it into my PowerMac to start up iTunes and get going.
It quickly loaded up my shuffle with 193 songs. First little glitch - it put a bunch of random tracks from audio books in with the music. To fix that, I sorted by genre and deleted the book tracks. Then I created a smart playlist defined as not genre audiobook and not books & spoken. I'll get my shot of tunes from that list when I want any music from my whole library.
I was just about to start bopping around and hooked up the lanyard and put it around my neck and plugged in the headphones and then -- nothing. Needed to charge for 4 hours. So, I plugged it back into the USB port and went to bed for the night.
Some quick thoughts. This is going to work great for discovering all the good music in my music collection from albums I haven't listened to enough. Only one problem with that. You can't see the artist or name of song while you are listening and discovering cool new songs. I'm thinking there should be a preference to save the random playlists that get generated for the shuffle so you can refer to them later to find your good songs and rate them.
There may be another fix but I haven't found it yet. I would also like to be able to rate the song right from the shuffle. Maybe I'm dreaming, but some off beat button combo might work. Question, does the shuffle keep track of the songs I listen to or does iTunes keep track? I want all this listening data to be tracked. This is my main listening time - out on the street walking.
Sound is great. Apparently, better than other iPods according to PC Magazine. Gotta go try it out some more in the real world right now. See you later.