iTunes and iPods, for a long time, have been able to shuffle either by song (where all the songs in the playlist are mixed randomly) or by album (where all the albums in the playlist are mixed randomly, but the songs within each album are played together and in order).
The iPod touch and iPhone inexplicably lack the ability to shuffle by album. They only offer the choice to shuffle by song. This is brain-damaged; there is no possible reason for it; and I've written Apple many times to complain about it, to no avail as of firmware 2.1.
Since classical works are usually made up of multiple movements, and it usually makes no sense to listen to one movement at a time or to listen to the movements out of order, shuffle by album is the only reasonable way to listen to shuffled classical music.
Thus my iPod classic (and the previous 4G iPod) works well for listening to classical music for long periods of time. On the touch or iPhone, I have to choose my music manually, which is more of a pain and less likely to give me interesting music.
The lossy version of my collection is about 70 GB. Of that number, 63 GB is classical and 7 GB is not. So this is an important issue to me.
