My ipod no longer sorts songs alphabetically

Question

My itunes is fine.  But my ipod no longer lists songs alphabetically.  It mixes the As with the Bs, Bs with the Cs and so on.  The bar on the view screen that indicates which letter of the alphabet is being displayed is randomly placed in the middle of a letter.  Sometimes songs from the end of the alphabet are listed randomly in the middle of a different letter. Also, my search functions don't always work.  Sometimes songs that I know are on my ipod don't show up in the song view.  I search the artist view, sometimes that helps, sometimes not.  Then I switch to the album view, again, sometimes this helps.  Often I need to use the search bar at the top of the screen.  Today I typed in a song name and got zero results, then a few seconds later the entire screen changed and the song showed up.I have tried restoring my ipod, syncing my ipod, rebooting my ipod, nothing has helped.  My ipod has become exceedingly dyslexic.  Help.

Answer 1

Storage space on the iPod would not affect shuffled playlists or playlist shuffling, though substantially full iPods may wind up skipping songs on larger playlists after a while, and require a restart.  As for compressing the files themselves, you can automatically re-encode files to a lower bitrate by checking the box on the summary page when your iPod is connected to your PC/Mac.
As for the shuffle problem, after restarting your iPod (hold the center button and Menu for a few seconds, until the Apple logo appears), make sure you're telling the iPod to shuffle the songs in a playlist by repeatedly clicking the center button until the Suffle Menu comes up, then scroll to the right to turn it on.  From that song forward, the playlists' contents should be shuffled every time the playlist ends, or is accessed from a new song.
Shuffle does sometimes turn itself off, I've found, so double-check the setting is still on.  Also, iPods shuffle by randomly assigning a playlist order for your songs, which is different from traditional shuffle (on, say, iTunes or Windows Media Player, where the new song is determined at random upon the current track ending.  The iPod only chooses a random order of songs when you shuffle, to conserve battery life and queue up songs coming up on the playlist in the event of a shock).