Shuffle Rant

[tayefeth]

I know it's nothing compared to the Bush administration's continuing mauling of US ideals or the effect of sexism on the world's children, but I really, really, really wish Apple would get its head out of its collective ass and stop treating podcasts as a special case on the iPods. WTF is up with not being able to reorder podcasts on the Shuffle?

Comments

[flit]

I listen to a lot of my podcasts by making music playlists of them, which is possible, and them import them as music playlists. That may help with your shuffle woes.

[tayefeth]

AFAIK, playlists of podcasts won't work on the 2nd generation Shuffle. I know they won't work on the video nano. When I called to complain about this, the support folks were bewildered that I didn't consider this lack a feature. I returned the video nano I'd bought and bought a 2nd generation Shuffle. At least it doesn't force me to listen to all of my new Onion Radio Newses in a row...

[flit]

Ugh, that's terrible. I have a normal nano and they work okay on that, and I'd HATE it if they didn't.

There's a way to convert podcasts to non-podcasts, but it's pretty tiresome IIRC. It mystifies me that Apple treats podcasts as some inviolate weirdly special thing when they're just... music... tracks....

[jlighton]

It's far from an ideal solution, but you may be able to force it to do what you want by exporting a playlist to a different format, editing it by hand, then reimporting it. (Or, failing that, by editing iTunes' copies of the playlists.)

Of course, I don't have a Shuffle, so don't know if the way you load it from iTunes will helpfully get in the way of this.