Article in Wired looking at using random play in your iPod:
Stuffy old listening habits -- like listening to albums from beginning to end -- are being thrown out in favor of allowing machines to choose songs at random, which often leads to unexpected, and magical, juxtapositions of music."There is something thrilling about setting the player on Shuffle and letting it decide what to play next," Ross writes. "The little machine often goes crashing through barriers of style in ways that change how I listen."
Random shuffle is nothing new. It first became popular as a feature of CD players. But with CDs, shuffling tracks is typically limited to the tracks on a single CD.
Randomly selecting tracks really comes into its own with giant music collections: libraries that stretch to tens of thousand of songs. In a giant library, random shuffle is a good way -- sometimes the only way -- to hear music that would otherwise go unplayed.
I'm a fan of the shuffle feature myself, but I also find that it can be exhausting. My iPod has been known to jump from Norman Blake to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, then to Värttinä, then to "Milkshake," then to "Strange Fruit." I'm all for variety, but if it jumps genres too many times in a row I feel like someone has taken my brain and stuck in in the blender on purée. So...for the last week or so I've compromised and set my iPod to shuffle by album. I still get genre hops, but they're not nearly as frequent.
Posted by Jason at April 16, 2004 09:12 AM