Well, I finally got around to trying to setup these custom shuffle modes on my unit and discovered some interesting things...

The examples given here in this message thread do not work correctly with 2.0-beta3. For example, the following entry...

[custom]
shuffle0=Most often played,-PLAYS=1

causes a bizzare shuffling of songs that doesn't make sense. Even worse, if you attempt to apply this shuffle to a huge playlist your player may hang with an hourglass on the screen forever (kind of reminds me of good old Windows 3.1!)

However, the following entry works exactly as expected...

[custom]
shuffle0=Most often played,PLAYS=-1

Perhaps this odd -PLAYS / -TIME syntax only applies to older alpha/beta versions, while the newer releases simply use negative numbers? Anyone from empeg care to comment?