For Christmas I purchased a new 1GB iPod Shuffle for my wife to replace her existing 512MB Shuffle...
After opening it she gave the old one to my daughter and tried to get the new one setup and loaded...
It went downhill from there.
You might be wondering why I would purchase another iPod product after all the difficulty I have been having with my 30GB iPod Video.
To be honest, my wife has NEVER had a problem with her shuffle and she wanted one of the newer smaller ones. She was also being pestered by my daughter who was hell bent on "inheriting" said shuffle.
Purchasing the iPod was pain free. At the Apple store in the Danbury Fair Mall they had a special area for iPod sales. All you had to do was hand them your credit card and an email address and they gave you an iPod.
Wrapping it was also pain free as my daughter did that. She also signed the card as if the gift was only from her but hey, kids do that.
Christmas morning she opened it up and plugged it into her computer...
I know a lot of people got iPods for Christmas and the iTunes store and servers were flooded but... It took forever for her to connect and right away it wanted to update the firmware.
That may have been the biggest mistake.
After updating the firmware she encountered a horrible problem.
The new shuffle was not being recognized by the computer. It didn't always happen either!
Sometimes it would find it right away, load iTunes and work fine. Other times Windows would find it as a USB drive and iTunes would not. Even worse, there were times when iTunes would see it and then it would just vanish... even in the middle of transferring files!
I've checked the Apple Support forums but no one has an answer for this problem (though others do have this problem.)
Here is a synopsis:
1) new shuffle not being seen by computer
2) new shuffle seen by computer but not iTunes
3) new shuffle seen by computer, iTunes loads (set to load on connection) but then iTunes does not see shuffle
4) new shuffle connects properly to iTunes and then vanishes (from iTunes and windows)
5) new shuffle connects properly to iTunes and then vanishes (only from iTunes, windows still sees it)
6) new shuffle is seen by windows and then vanishes from windows
I'm going batty here!
One suggestion I did read was to enable disk use. I tried to do this but every time I get an error message (unknown error -50) and iTunes and the computer "lose" the shuffle...
I thought it might have been a bad dock but the fact that others are having the same problem leads me to believe otherwise.
Also, the new shuffle should have an amber light on while charging. The amber light only comes on when windows "sees" the shuffle. Right now it often blinks 7 times and then vanishes from Windows! How can I charge it if it's not being seen by the computer? The light stays amber while it charges and then goes green to indicate a full charge.
I have had some luck connecting with the shuffle turned on but I still can not enable disk use or restore it without iTunes kicking it out. The above problems also still occur, just not as quickly.
I don't want to drive back to the Apple store but I may just have to.
Links from the Apple Support Boards:
My Shuffle keeps disappearing
2nd Gen Shuffle won't stay connected to iTunes
UPDATE:
I have found the solution to my problem. My wife's computer had an older USB port while my laptop had a slightly newer USB version that sent a little bit more power over the bus. I went out and purchased a USB 2.0 PCI card for her and installed it. Now all of our problmes are solved!
It looks like the new shuffle needs a little bit more power over the bus to operate properly when connected to your computer. If you are having this problem AND you have USB 2.0 ports please let me know.
