I know I don't have enough readers to staer a meme or a movement but....
iPod Nano's need Autofill!
How does it make sense that 512MB and 1GB Shuffles get autofill in iTunes, but 1GB, 2GB and 4GB Nanos do not? I would think that most people that would own an iPod have more than 4GB of music to put on it. Autofill on the Shuffles is great! You point it at a playlist and have iTunes dump music onto your iPod til it fills up. Good stuff.
If you spend the extra $$ to upgrade to a Nano, especially if you owned a Shuffle previously, you're actually taking a downgrade in functionality. Suddenly, you lose Autofill and have to do it like the big iPods do....pick a playlist to sync it up to.
That's OK when you have +20GB of storage, but when you're working with as little as 1GB, you now have to create a playlist small enough to fit the Nano and figure out how to populate it with a variety of music from your library.
It gets worse if you have iTunes download your Podcasts. If you sync your Podcasts list to your iPod, now you have a second playlist to deal with that could vary greatly in size. So you have to either short the "iPod Music" list or keep adjusting its size to fill up what the Podcasts list doesn't.
If anyone knows of a less labor-intensive way to handle space/music management on a Nano, I'd be glad to take a look.
Nanos are cool, but not as usable as Shuffles. Yet. Too bad, really. I'll be submitting an enhancement request for iTunes soon.
Update -
I should have looked more before I posted. The Apple support forum has a pretty good discussion on this subject and some of the posters make a pretty good argument that with good use of iTunes' Smart Playlist functionality, you can approximate some of the functionality.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=874883&
This still doesn't really address how to do Autofill-like functionality when you have a variably sized Podcast playlist on the Nano as well. It is enough to get me thinking of other ways to work around it though. Will do a follow-up if I work together something interesting or satisfying.
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