I've previously reported that Podcasts are out of order once transferred to an iPod -- I cannot tell how they're sorting, but it's not by name, filename, date, or track number. I was trying to use smartlists as a workaround for this issue, and I discovered that they files are STILL out of order when accessed via the "Playlist" category on the iPod. On top of this, I noticed that the main playlist I use to sync my iPod (i.e. the one that contains ALL my files on the iPod) is ALSO out of order. I still get "groups" of files in the correct order -- i.e. an album of songs will be grouped together and the songs will be in order -- but overall there doesn't seem to be any recognizable pattern to why the album groups are listed in the order that they are, or why some songs are not grouped with their album. It's not by artist, date, or album name, and I honestly don't see the pattern.
I have a suspicion that whatever is causing the podcasts do list out of order is the same reason that songs are listed out of order. Note that this issue may not show up when viewing only a few items since many of the tracks still group together for 8 or 9 in a row. If you have a lot of files in a single podcast, however, it quickly becomes obvious they are NOT sorting correctly.
Could someone from JR possibly look into this? It's been reported for quite a while now, and it's become a much more serious issue with the new Classic iPods -- it's no longer just a minor nuisance. Because of this issue, there is quite literally NO way to display podcasts in order on the new Classic iPod. I used to be able to navigate to Genre > Podcast, but "Podcast" is no longer included in the Genre list of the 6th gen units. I have podcasts with dozens of episodes, which makes it VERY difficult to find the next one in order.
Note that I see similar behavior on two different iPods (5th and 6th gen) after syncing on two different systems (XP and Vista.)
Thanks for any help with this,
Larry