I added a ton of information about this problem directly on the gnome bug report. Thought it would copy here, no such luck. Anyway if you look there you can find dumps of the shuffle data structure. This should allow fixing of the problem even for those without shuffles.
>From looking at it myself, I am pretty sure that the problem is that rb does not write the iTunesSD file. This is a file that is on every ipod but only used on the shuffle, so other devs have not bothered with it. So when you open gtkpod it senses that iTunesSD is not written to and constructs the iTunesSD file from the info in the iTunesDB file. This would make it shuffle specific. I hope apple in a firmware upgrade makes the other ipods use this file. It would make all of the ipods easier to support and force the devs to do it right. For the record, banshee does write it perfectly, but it does not have transcoding and is missing the browse feature of rhythmbox and itunes. -- adding songs to ipod shuffle doesn't update iTunesDB properly https://launchpad.net/bugs/68300 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs