In the new thunar-volman 0.5 (maybe in previous version, don't remember), if I only check "Play music files when connected" in multimedia => Portable Music Player, and plug my ipod, nothing append. I need to check "Mount removable drive when hot-plugged" in "Storage => Removable Storage" too, for everything to work. So thunar-volman should enable /automount-drives/enabled in xfconf when /autoipod/enabled is true.
Your suggested solution is not what we want. Instead, we want ONLY the iPod to be mounted prior to playing music on it, not all volumes. Also, when users modify the configuration using xfce4-settings-editor, they could forget to turn on /automount-drives/enabled. So in those situations your solution would fail. It's probably better to just check if we have an iPod and if autoipod is enabled and then continue mounting the drive, even if automount-drives is not enabled.
This of course affects all media players, not just iPods.
Yep, your solution is the best behavior (my 'solution' was just the current workaround).
Closing. Please reopen if still reproducible on an up-to-date system.