If I can wait until Fujitsu actually ships a 100GB, then I can snatch up a 48GB Travelstar or two. Maybe by then I'll get through all the vinyl.

You guys amaze me. I can't imagine having so much music that a pair of 48 GB drives wouldn't be enough.

I have a single 18 GB drive, it is only a bit more than half full, and I almost never add anything to it any more. (This is because Mozart and Beethoven have not released any new hits in quite a while now...) Keep in mind, also, that my "Rock/Favorites" playlist has a total of 11 songs in it.

But even with my "limited" 160 hour collection, I still play almost exclusively shuffled from root, and am constantly delighted to hear music I had forgotten I'd had.

And... here is a sneak preview of a 2.00 Beta 4 feature that Dan Zimmerman and I lobbied for and got over the objections of most of the rest of the alpha testers and a lot of the guys@empeg too. I guess we just wore them down. Thanks, Roger, for putting this in. I've tested it, and it works as promised.

We now have the ability to turn off the deletion of duplicates when a playlist is shuffled. (It requires a tweak to the config.ini file to do this)

Why would anyone want to do this? Especially since the deletion of duplicates was a feature that they added to the player software at the request of the users? Think of this scenario: I have a "Favorites" playlist with 141 tracks in it. I can now add (either insert or append) this playlist to my root playlist -- do it multiple times even -- then reshuffle, and my "favorite" songs come up on average once out of every four plays. It greatly elevates the quality of a fully shuffled root playlist without overdoing the favorites, and still lets me hear the songs I had forgotten I had. I love it.

tanstaafl.