ok, well it's possible that i've been doing everything wrong--the interface is a bit confusing. i'm not sure how to add a playlist then. if i go to what i assume is the playlist viewer (paper with notes icon, then "playlist" on the right of the page), i see "queue". i'm able to add songs to the queue by either going to the musical note icon (which has "browser" on the right and "queue" on the left) and selecting albums (since the upgrade to 0.96.4.1, i can no longer see genres/artists/songs--only albums) or through the folder icon. going back the playlist viewer, i see the songs added to "queue". at this point, nothing shuffles, which you say is normal. however, i don't see how to add songs to an actual playlist. if i click on the plus icon in the playlist view, i'm prompted for a playlist name, which shows up on that same view. i then get a blank playlist, which i can't figure out how to add songs to. perhaps you can tell me how to get it to do what i want:

1. i'd like to either select all songs on my sd card, or better yet, be able to create a playlist by selecting all songs under several genres.
2. shuffle through all these songs. it would be nice if the playlist actually shuffled, so you could see what had already played, and what will be playing next. otherwise, just skipping from song to song randomly (which i think is the default behavior) would be ok.

thanks for the help--i'd love to RTFM if there was one...