got my ipod shuffle today

I pre-ordered a shuffle a couple days after macworld and got it today. seems very cool and I am very impressed with how it interacts with itunes and osx,

my one complaint is that its not that loud. I have tried increasing songs volume in info and even saving an eq seting with the pre-amp all the way up. none of these methods seems to be able to increase the volume. ideas?

dunno, mine seems pretty dam loud, thiers a few songs in my collection that are quite but thats because their bad rips. Are you using the resample to 128K option by the way?

no. would that help or make it worse?

not sure, I just turned it on based on the fact that most of my mp3s are at least 192kbs so a bit large for a flash player, I was wondering wheather the converting to 128k had adjusted the volume at all. I did tell itunes to adjust all my songs volumes at one point, maybe thats helped. I just tried it with a decent set of headphones and it does sound a bit louder, but I also tried my iPod headphones in my old MD player and that went a lot louder.

Thiere was a volume limit on all the european versions of the big ipods, it has to do with conforming to some euro regs, the US ones where louder aparently.
People used to copy the US firmware to the Euro iPods to get round it, maybe thier will be a simliar hack for the shuffel.

info on a volume booster, sounds like it is what you just tried though...
http://volumebooster.tangerine-soft.de/

I think I'm going to go and try and find some new headphones for it, as it did sound lots nicer/louder though my big expensive Beyer Dynamics, thier just a bit big to carry around all the time, it sort of deafeats the point of having a tiny mp3 player if your headphons are five times the size!

I figured out a way to get the volume much higher. its a bit tedious but works none the less.

what I did was play my shuffles playlist with the volume on all the tracks increased by 100% and also with the pre-amp up all the way and captured it all with wiretap. I then use an app called audio slicer to separate all the songs as the captured file from wiretap is all one track. I had to convert the .aiff wiretap made to mp3 so that audioslicer could separate it. it only works with mp3..

I feel much more content knowing I can listen at the volume I want. thanks for your effort burntman.