Large itunes library, shuffle 3G, not random loading

It was my understanding that if you plug 3G shuffle into iTunes library that is larger than size of the shuffle then the system will randomly fill the shuffle with any songs in main library until the shuffle runs out of room. When I plug my 3G shuffle (4GB) into my iTunes (library of 10,000 songs), the songs that transfer are not random. Most of the songs are from artists early in the alphabet and sometimes entire albums get transferred. I realize that statistically this could actually be random, but it seems highly unlikely. I know I could create a playlist and sync from only that, but that defeats the purpose of wanting truly random from huge library.
Is anyone familiar with this issue? Can you help? Offer advice? Thanks in advance.
Message was edited by: Peter Weiss1

canadianbluespower wrote:
First Question:
How do I "selectively" synch music onto the ATV given I have more GB worth of data than the ATV capacity? Do I need to remove some sub folders from the iTunes directory? I would like to keep the reference data in the iTunes browser and not remove it.
You can choose which playlists get synced to the tv, use playlists to collect all the tunes you want synced.
Second question:
I tried streaming over the weekend by reconnnecting iTunes to my PC, and the the "loading library" messge was displayed for well over 8 hours without my being able to access any photos or music. I guessed that this was because of the size of the library. Is this typical?
At 8 hours it won't be anything to do with the size of the library.
The size of a library can make a difference to the time it takes a library to load but only in terms of maybe taking a minute or longer instead of 15 seconds or so. Actually it's the size of the library database file that counts here and not the size of all the content. For example my content occupies
1.7 TB but my database is around 22 MB, I have around 10,000 tunes and 1,000 videos of one kind or another, but if your 220 GB of content is all music you may have 40,000 tunes and a database of around 80 MB.
I am connected via Linksys Powerline, hard wired ethernet over my AC lines. Synching works well this way, but I am wondering if streaming does not do so well over this type of connection.
If I'm not mistaken AC uses one of these and I don't think he has mentioned any problems with.

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