Ah, well, preventing Podcasts from being mixed in when playing music in shuffle mode makes sense, except that if you are playing a Playlist and turn on Shuffle mode, it only suffles within that Playlist. I can easily create a playlist that contains all the Music and none of the Podcasts on my player. I can NOT easily retag all of my podcasts to make a pseudo playlist by creating a series with matching Album info and individually altering each Track Number field to get them into the desired order. They could also have made the over-all Shuffle ignore “Podcast” files, yet still allow “Podcast” files to be included in Playlists.
I have a Sansa Express that I have used for years without all of these goofy issues. I expected the Sansa Clip+ to act much the same, but the special handling of “Podcast” files has been a bit of an unpleasant surprise. My primary use of my player is to listen to podcasts in chronoligical order (I like to listen to news podcasts from different areas of the US, Canada, and the UK to get broader coverage of current events and different viewpoints.) Playlists easily allows me to copy over my podcasts and have them in chronoligical order without any need to individually alter any of the files.
Keeping “things simple and just avoid using playlists” would mean that my podcasts would play in alphabetical order, jumbling up the news stories (I often get a few days behind), and any unfortunate podcasts with a name/album starting near the end of the alphabet would constantly get pushed to the end of the queue each time if I resynced before listening to every one of my podcasts first.
It sounds to me like the thinking about the Podcast files had a grain of good thinking behind it, but did not take nearly enough into account, and could have easily been made more general and MUCH more functional by merely providing a simple bookmark linked to each playlist file. No need to check “Genre”, no need to check “Album”, no need to check “Track Number”.
