I am not a big iTunes fan, but I use it to sync music to my Second Generation iPod Shuffle.  I really like the shuffle, I don’t deal with playlists, a concept I can’t seem to wrap my head around creating and managing. With the Shuffle I just sync the device put it on shuffle and go.  The shuffle also has great battery life, one charge lasts more then a week of heavy usage, while also letting me listen to music with out draining the battery on my phone (you know I worry about these things).

Today I decided it was time to change out some of the music on the shuffle, and in the process learnt something new.  Here is the view of the shuffle in iTunes, you will notice it is sorted by artist A to Z:

In the process of looking through for items to remove I changed the sort view a few times to look at different views. When I went back to listening to music, I found that the forward button on the shuffle was moving backwards through the alphabet, and the back button was moving forwards.  This was driving me crazy.  Finally a colleague of mine suggested that I check the sort order in iTunes.  So I opened iTunes back up and sure enough it looked like this, sorted Z to A:

Once I changed the sort order back to A to Z and synced again it was all back to normal forward was forward and back was back.

I never would have thought that the current view in iTunes would sync to the iPod but sure enough it does.  I have had this shuffle for a while and never run in to this before, live and learn.