Steve,
After a rather long and drawn out story involving CompUSA putting up huge resistance to the honoring of the TAP they sold me for my G2 iPod, I am now the proud owner of a G4 20GB unit running firmware 3.0.1. Everything has worked well in MC so far. I couldn't get MC 11 to properly recognize my ipod with MC 10 uninstalled. That was a minor hassle, but so long as MC 10 is installed, the iPod functions just as before.
Unfortunately, my playlist problem from before persists. MC is not properly updating playlist contents following a synch. If a song is deleted from a playlist, it would appear that MC does not always remove that song from the ipod's version of that list upon synch. I have the ipod configured to delete songs not in synch. Songs are physically removed from the ipod properly, but the playlist entries get all screwed up.
The problem might be that if the song still exists on a playlist somewhere in the ipod, and therefore is not deleted, MC does not remove it from the playlists that the song is no longer on. But that wouldn't explain why some songs which i know to have been deleted from the ipod persisted in playlists after their removal from the player.
Another possibility is that i'm using smartlists which draw random samples of a handful of songs from other lists in MC. In theory, and in MC itself, these random samples are different each time I look at the list. Synching to ipod, however, additively increases the songs that appear in the playlist even though some of them get skipped because they've been deleted on subsequent synchs.
Yet more troubling, though, is that i've stumbled across another problem that may not be related. I had a song on a regular list in MC. I then changed it's rating to 4 stars and removed it from the playlist. Changing the rating should cause it to show up in a "4 Star" smartlist automatically. I saw that it was deleted from the ipod and properly removed from the playlist upon my first subsequent synch, yet failed to reappear in the smartlist as it should have.
More puzzling, is that another song removed from the same playlist and deleted from the ipod during synch, remained in the playlist in the ipod.
Upon a second synching, the song appeared in the "4 star" star list as it should have.
Also, when i de-select a playlist for synching, it remains on the ipod.