As I said back there, I ordered up an 512MB iPod shuffle the morning after the announcement, caught up in the excitement of it all. I’d been looking for some simple mp3 player to take me from home to work and back again on foot or on the cat bus and nothing was going to be sufficiently easy to work with until the shuffle came along.

Now, the shipping date is listed as 27 January, a couple of weeks away still. And I’m curious: what does 512MB randomly shuffled feel like?

To try it out I made a smart playlist in iTunes limited to 512MB selected randomly from all the songs in iTunes with a rating of more than 1 star. This means it picks up everything that I’v bothered to rate as 2 stars or greater in iTunes. I went through my library and rated a whole lot more songs till I’d found 512MB worth.

And then turn on shuffle and set it to play. About one in five songs I intervene and go forward a track because I’m not in the mood. Apart from that, I leave it alone.

The result is rather good. There’s enough randomness to make it interesting, but not too much. I think 512MB is going to be good.

It seems like I have some sort of back-of-brain familiarity with all 91 songs in the playlist. I don’t know much about how our brains deal with groups of 90 or 100 things but not 2,500 (my full iTunes Library). I’ll have a look in the Mind Hacks book (thanks Phil, great present) and see if they have anything to say about this.