Okay, granted, the Otterbox is nigh on indestructable, but I still question its shock absorption. This isn’t much of an issue for the flash-based iPods, but the hard-drive based ones need it.
In iTunes, click View->Show Duplicates. Problem solved. For me though, I’m a bit of an anal completionist, so if I have albums that duplicate a a particular song, I leave it that way. It just bugs me when there’s gaps in an album. This is especially true for electronica “in-the-mix” albums, where a missing song creates a disconcerting jump in the music flow.
You don’t have to pay attention to things like release year, album art, genre, or such things if you don’t plan on creating smart playlists that use them, so the task of editing ID3 tags doesn’t need to be that involved. One of the cool things about iTunes though is the ability to batch edit. You can select a whole album, for example, and right-click and select “show info” to edit all of the tags in that album at once that are going to be the same for each track – artist name, album name, year, genre, number of tracks, number of discs, etc. Once that’s done you can, if necessary, go back and edit one by one each track to change whatever is different for each song – like the song names, track numbers, disc numbers, etc. Saves a lot of time.
I like the way it looks “naked” too, but my desire for an esthetically pleasing unit is outweighed by my desire not to spend another $400 on a new iPod anytime soon because I killed or otherwise damaged my current one. Plus, there are some pretty sweet-looking cases out there. Check out cases by Sena, Krussel, and Covertec. They all make some very nice stuff. The iPod only comes with a cloth pouch. Pretty cheap of Apple if you ask me.
Yes. iTunes can handle multiple connected units and treat them all separately.