Recently, I found myself getting ready to mow the grass on an unseasonably warm weekend afternoon, and I decided I'd rather listen to music than the drone of a lawnmower engine. (My Klipsch in-ear headphones help tremendously with this kind of thing.) However, I didn't feel like carrying my full-sized iPod® with me while pushing around a mower. Sure, the iPod is relatively compact, but rather than jamming it into my pocket, I opted to borrow my wife's iPod® shuffle, which I could just clip to my shirt.

There was just one minor problem to solve (and quickly, so as not to squander the remaining sunlight): how to set up her shuffle to play my music. First, I decided to save the existing contents as a playlist in iTunes, so I could easily undo whatever changes I made. Then when I docked the shuffle and launched iTunes on our PC, I noticed a button down at the bottom of the screen that said "Autofill." I'd never seen it before, because iTunes doesn't display this option when you sync a full-size iPod. Anyway, this was clearly the answer to my problem.

The Autofill feature automatically selects just enough music to fill up your iPod shuffle, giving you an easy way to freshen up your mix of songs. One click, and I had a gig's worth of music ready to go. A dropdown box lets you choose a specific playlist to pull from; I simply stuck with the default setting and let it pull tunes randomly from my entire library. If you happen to use iTunes' 1-5 star rating system to categorize your music, you can also give additional "weight" to highly rated tracks, but I left this box unchecked just to see what I would get.    

Here's what I found to be the coolest aspect of the Autofill feature: it's a great way to rediscover some of the "hidden corners" of your music collection. Who'd have thought that Metallica's "Orion" and Brian Wilson's "Wind Chimes" would play so well back to back? Or that Coltrane and The Pixies make such a nice mix? If I had "manually" assembled a playlist, it wouldn't have sounded as fresh or spontaneous. In short, it really is like listening to a radio station where the DJ is your own subconscious. 

So now I'm hoping we get a little more unseasonably warm weather here in Virginia, so I can cut the grass and borrow the iPod shuffle again.