ready to throw my shuffle out the window; fixed it

For “light duty” and running and whatnot, I have a 1gb iPod shuffle. Since my regular iPod is temporarily out of commission, (that is a story for an upcoming article) I’ve been using the shuffle day to day. I loaded some kick-ass songs on it, but no matter how kick-ass those songs are, once you’ve heard them all a few times an overwhelming need to get new songs appears.

I popped the sucker into an available USB slot and load iTunes. Once there, I cleared a bunch of songs and added some new ones. It would take 2–10 seconds per song to “update” and everything looked hunky dory. Except later while adjusting the seat on the stationary bike and finding out that none of my changes had taken and I was stuck listening to the same stuff as the day before. In escalating degrees of aggressiveness this same pattern happened for five straight days.

Finally, I deduced the problem and solution.

1. Open Windows Computer Management (by right clicking my computer and choosing Manage)
2. Open the Disk Management tool
3. Find the Disk that most closely resembles your iPod shuffle (by size probably) and change the drive letter to an unused one
4. Either restart Windows or just the iPodService and iTunes.

My problem was that since I’m constantly plugging in flash cards, external harddrives and stuff, drive letters get mixed up and the shuffle is too dumb to try and pick a new, empty one. It just goes with whatever you set it up originally on even if there is already something there. I have no idea where iTunes thought it was copying those files to, but it wasn’t where I wanted.