Purchased an ipod shuffle(2nd gen) and encoded using nero's encoder with a -q 0.30 -if %s -of %d, .m4a setting and copied the songs onto the ipod thru itunes, but the ipod gives back a "no music on unit", even though all the songs are copied.
So Im assuming the encoder does not work with the new ipod shuffle...

From Wikipedia: "As of October 2007, Apple has still not added support for HE-AAC" and Nero uses he-aac for q=0.3 and less by default.
Try to encode with -q 0.31 Or you may use "-q 0.30 -lc" options.

This is a known problem that the Nero team is hopefully working on solving for the next version. See the following thread:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=57805

Even if you use the low complexity profile, which, as lvqcl pointed out is required, the files will not copy to an iPod Shuffle 2nd Generation. The current work around is to use the "Optimize MP4 Layout" feature of foobar2000 (found in the Utilities contextual menu).

The latest, albeit incomplete, listening test by guruboolez (found here) indicated that the latest version of the Nero Encoder may producer lower quality files than the February 2007 build, at least when encoding classical music. You may want to try using the older build until Nero has resolved these issues, or simply use iTunes to encode using iTunesEncode46 to access it via a CLI.

From: dbAmp's link
By: menno, Nero MPEG4 developer, Oct 30 2007

"iPod Shuffle (2nd generation) only reads MP4 descriptor (some sort of info blocks inside a mp4 file) sizes that are written in 4 bytes. We always write the minimal amount of bytes.
We are checking if we should just write it in 4 bytes always also.
Seems the only affected device is the 2nd generation iPod Shuffle"

Ok, that pretty much sums it up! Hopefully this will pass approval with the developers group and get modified in the NEAR future...

Thanks all!
Cheers