Nope, not at all - there’s a nifty little hold button that prevents the click wheel from being accidentally futzed with.
With the iPod/iTunes, you can create a “Smart Playlist”; it’s a list of songs that are dynamically updated as your criteria changes. You could, for instance, have a “Classical” smart playlist that has all your songs tagged with “Genre” = “Classical,” then select that and shuffle through it.
Or you can get really wild, and create a list like:
…genre is “Rock”…
…rating is “3 stars” or better…
…last played is one week ago or later…
…artist is not “Billy Joel”…
…limit list to 10 songs…
You then end up with a list of 10 Billy Joel-free Rock songs, all of whom you’ve rated 3 stars or better, and you haven’t heard in a week or more.
Let’s see the Creative do that. 
But why would you do that when you can simply do: Browse > Genres > Classical ?
The Rock ‘n’ Roll one is slightly more complicated, 'cause I’ve got the following genres Alternative, Electronica, Pop and Rock. I don’t usually change the genres from how they come down from the CDDB–but I could change them so that all of those are just called Rock. Or I could do a Smart Playlist, as rjung suggests.
I love my Creative Zen Jukebox I got a year ago. I hate ear buds and headphones, so I jack it into either my computer, the car radio (with a modulator) or mostly an old set of Sony speakers that I bought back in '86 when I got my first Discman (at work where I listen to it the most).
Can you shuffle in Genres? Never tried, myself.
Besides, Smart Playlists are too cool for words. Use 'em wherever possible.
As much as I love neat gadgets I’'ll agree with you here 100%. There are times peace and quit is the most important thing you can have. I love music, but needing or having 10,000 songs at my fingertips 24/7 is a bit much.
Yup. You can shuffle anything. Just put your iPod (or iTunes, if you’re listening on your computer) in shuffle mode and browse to whatever you want (a genre, an artist, or an album) and hit play.
Too true. I have an “Orchestral” smart playlist with all the classical stuff, plus a list of soundtrack composers. (I didn’t want the whole Soundtrack genre because it contains non-orchestral soundtracks.)
You can also use the search feature in iTunes to do cool stuff. Want to listen to every song in your library with “love” in the title? Just type “love” into the wee search thingie at the upper right hand corner of iTunes, and, badda-bing, instant playlist. Not exactly a smart playlist, but pretty clever anyway. Every artist named David or Dave? Type “Dav”. Naturally, you can make Smart Playlists out of all of these too, with just a few more clicks.
Happy ipod owner here. Best investment I’ve ever made.
On the subject of the headphones, those things suck. I hate in-ear headphones as it is, but those are horrible. I threw them out after trying them once and stuck to my trusty over-ear headphones that I’ve been using for a couple of years. I occasionally get asked why I don’t use the white headphones with it, and when I ask them why I should, I’ve gotten the answers of “so that other people know that you have an ipod!” and “because what’s the point of having an ipod if everyone thinks that you’re listening to a cd player” … these people I want to punch. I didn’t get my ipod to show off my bling bling, I got it to store my entire music collection (well, 40GB of it…I managed to fill it) in my pocket.
I’ve also been asked at least 3 times by strangers who’ve seen me holding my ipod how I managed to change the headphones. I can’t even dignify that with an answer.
I agree with you about the headphones. I used them twice, then ditched 'em and went back to my old pair that I’d used with my DiscMan (before I dropped it and decided to buy an iPod). The kind that hook over your ear like eyeglasses, with the connecting band going around the back of your head, are the most comfortable headphones I’ve ever worn.
Also, I’ve never met anyone who thought I should use the headphones it came with so “everyone knows I own an iPod.” If I ever meet them, I will beat them to death with their own iPod, then string up the corpse with their crappy ear-bud iPod headphones as a warning to shallow idiots everywhere.
Those people die, too. For the good of the human species.
There is a freeware program called audacity that allows you to record from the line in to your computer and save the files as mp3s. Then you can listen to them any way you want. You can download many radio shows from newsgroups and I am sure you could record them through your computer somehow if you wanted to.
I love iTunes and my iPod, the biggest downside is you have to spend a lot of time rating your music and making sure the tags are the way you want them. Once you get everything rated and tagged it’s great, I can find anything in my music collection quickly and easily and I can make up playlists in a few minutes. I could never get windows media player to do anything except play files, anytime I tried to make a playlist it turned into a disaster.
The iPod (and other mp3 players I suppose) are far superior to CDs, I have ~1200 songs on mine which would be about 100 audio CDs. 100 audio cds are far bigger than the iPod and you still need something to play them in. With my iPod if I don’t care about the artist but just want to listen to rock I click Genre rock and let the iPod shuffle through all my rock songs. If I want just 80’s :o music I click my 80s playlist. Etc., lets see you do that with your CDs.
Of course there is no need to have 1000+ songs with you all the time but with it so easy to carry so much music I find myself listening to stuff I might not otherwise. I also have about 5 audio books in my iPod, I only listen to one at a time but when I am ready to start a new one I have several to choose from.
Personally I love iTunes and my iPod and think I got my moneys worth but if another mp3 player suits you better than I hope you enjoy it.