Steve,
in MC11.225, I see that we now have the option to save settings based on the Portable device. But either I don't understand what it is supposed to do or it is not working all the way.
I have an iPod, a Creative MuVo N2000 and a PDA (hmm, I'd like to have a laptop, too, but that seems to have gotten broken somewhere along the line?). All of these are recognized by MC and they are all listed in the Portable Options (the MuVo 2000 is listed twice -- not sure why).
The MuVo and the iPod are the two device I really use and I use them quite differently, which is why I have been interested in this functionality. So I chose those Options and set them the way I wanted them to be (e.g. I convert files to WMA 128 on the MuVo, no conversion for the iPod, etc.). I also picked the "Auto Sync" and chose the Playlists I wanted to sync for both devices.
When I connected the iPod and chose Sync from AW, the playlists selected were NOT the ones I had chosen in the iPod Options, they were the ones that had been selected the last time I had tried to sync a device. I clicked on Options (mostly because that seems to get the Free Space to calculate) and a) it automatically comes up to the Options for the first listed device (CF Card in my case), NOT the iPod; and b) all the settings for the iPod were as I had set them.
Pretty much got the same results with the MuVo (playlists selected when I synced were NOT the ones chosen for the MuVo in Options), although I never could sync, because the Free Space calculation was wrong (even after deleting everything on the MuVo).