Okay stick with me on this one, has anyone noticed that the iPod ‘shuffle songs’ seems to have an almost spooky ability to pick similar songs? You know rock or classical tunes only a couple away, or songs by the same artist close to one another. Ofcourse this could just the coincidence of ‘random’ selection (although true randomness in computers is debatable) however it just seems like the iPod ‘knows’ to play similar songs close to one another. Maybe this is the answer?
One of the biggest problems was battery life. If the drive was kept spinning while playing songs, it quickly drained the batteries. The solution was to load several songs into a bank of memory chips, which draw much less power. The drive could be put to sleep until it’s called on to load more songs. While other manufacturers used a similar architecture for skip protection, the first iPod had a 32-MB memory buffer, which allowed batteries to stretch 10 hours instead of two or three.
From here.