Comments on: Shuffle backlash brewing?

Are iPod fans about to rediscover the joys of listening to an album straight through?

[kmtkr]

Buddy - the 'random' related algorithms rely on the listener skipping over songs so it can tune the upcoming playlist - you sound as if you expect it to learn and react to your tastes without interaction. This 'story' is a non-starter, sorry.

You're the one due for a backlash if you don't park your imagination and start coming up with decent topics for discussion :)

Try doing a follow-up on the iTunes Store finally getting around to having both 'Rent' and 'Buy' buttons on various movie selections - just don't look for anything related to a 'backlash' this time, please.

[stefanvolos]

As someone who has a rather wide and varied taste in music, I never use the random shuffle feature for my entire iTunes library. The power of iTunes lies in the fact that you can be your own DJ and create as many customized playlists as you wish, and so I have playlists to suit my every mood and whim. Sure, it takes some time and organizational skills, but I seldom find myself compelled to skip a tune because something inappropriate suddenly came up.

[InklingBooks]

Apple needs to give Shuffle users more control by adding playlists that could be played straight through or shuffled (selectable in iTunes).

And they would not need to add a screen to do this. A spring-loaded position past On for the power switch would step from playlist to playlist. The first 'tune' in each list would be an iTunes-created text-to-sound file giving the name of the playlist. It'd be about five seconds long and, if the user does nothing, that playlist would begin to play. If the user doesn't want to listen to that list, he could step to the next.

As Shuffles store more and more music, this would let users select music to suit different moods. Soft, slow music for relaxing, faster music for jogging or whatever. And it'd add only pennies to the cost to make a Shuffle.

Make the playlists smart, and user-selected criteria would automatically add new music to a Shuttle. "New Songs" would automatically contain new tunes from iTunes. "Favorites" would automatically include most played songs.

--Mike Perry, Seattle

[shetaan819]

Here's what I do - I have a playlist for each genre - so for example, genre=HipHop/Rap and choose songs at 'Random'.....this gives you a selection of songs from a particular genre from old to new as long as its the same genre.....I've made sure all my mp3s have the appropriate genre set - this took a while as I have a collection of about 11K songs and songs from every genre out there but its been worth it......for those people who don't want to go through their whole collection and set genres for everything, iTunes or ZuneMarketplace should have a lookup service based on artist&songname that assigns genre so that your 'genre' playlist is automatically made for you.....hope this helps some of you out there....