BUG: Play in order (songs and podcasts)

Question

I manually load my shuffle with podcasts and music. I set the play order while the shuffle is still connected to my Powerbook: I want my songs to be first, then the podcasts. Everything seems okay when I eject the shuffle.
I reset the playlist (three quick clicks) expecting the first song in my playlist to begin playing. Instead the first podcast actually plays! Podcasts always play first in spite of my manual re-order of the playlist.
Also, while I can re-order songs in my playlist, I cannot re-order podcasts. In other words, songs, which I can manually re-order, do not play until after the last podcast plays. I cannot change the play order of the podcasts!
The reason I call this a bug is because iTunes allows me to manually drag selections around to re-order a playlist but, it does not actually transfer my changes to the shuffle.
Am I missing something or, is this the way it's supposed to work?

Answer 1

Podcasts play in something like the order they were downloaded. None of the sort columns will replicate that order, but it's in there, and there's no way to put podcasts into an iPod shuffle and have them play in any other order. Most frustrating.
What's needed is a quick and simple way to prevent iTunes and/or the iPod from recognizing podcasts, and treat them instead like any other mp3. I tried some simple things like changing the genre label from "Podcast" to something else, and moving the file out of the "Podcasts" folder in iTunes Music, but neither did the trick. I unchecked the two options "skip when shuffling" and "remember place" in the podcast's Get Info Options tab, but that didn't work. The file is identified as a regular mp3 file with the standard .mp3 filename extension, so it's not a case of needing to convert it from some exotic .mp? variant.
So it seems that whatever tags the file as a "podcast" is not accessible to the user in iTunes at least, unless someone can please prove me wrong. I haven't tried altering the Type/Creator codes for the podcast files in Finder -- anybody else tried that?
One thing finally worked, but it's somewhat cumbersome. I used the excellent shareware application MP3Trimmer to "repair" the podcast mp3 file. What this does whether the file is actually "broken" or not is strip out all non-audio information and yield a pure, clean raw mp3 file with all other tags and info removed. I put this file into iTunes, and voila! It's no longer recognized as a podcast file, and can be sorted into playlists on the iPod just like any other normal mp3 file.
Unfortunately, MP3Trimmer does not yet have a batch mode, which would be a huge help since the "cleaning" takes a while. But the MP3Trimmer developer, very friendly and helpful fellow, says that batch capability is at the top of his priority list and the next major update will have it. He updates the program pretty regularly, so I would guess that this should happen within the next few months -- maybe tomorrow for all I know!
If anyone knows of any other mp3-editing software that can similarly strip an mp3 file down to pure audio, I'm sure it would serve just as well, and if it already has batch capability -- well, please let me know!
Note that the MP3Trimmer solution has the advantage of not degrading the audio in any way. One could for example convert the podcast mp3 to a WAVE file and then back to an mp3 and most likely this would also succeed in removing any podcast identification from the file, but you'd suffer another audio fidelity loss in that additional conversion to mp3, and that's no good, is it?
iMac slot-loading G3 500 MHz   Mac OS X (10.2.x)