For me, this is iTunes and an iPod, so if these features are available through other software/players, let me know. Or, WTF, maybe it DOES some of these things and I don’t know how – so please tell me if it does.
I want more shuffle possibilities. I want to be able to shuffle by artist much more than by album since I hardly ever gut whole albums anymore. When I do want to shuffle by album, I want to be able to shuffle the songs within the albums. I want to be able to shuffle by genre.
And I’m really pissed that iTunes treats music that you get from other sources than the iTunes store like second class citizens. I haven’t run into this problem in a while, but I recall that iTunes has features that you can do for your iTunes purchases that you can’t do with other stuff, or you have to do weird work-arounds because of the differences.
I want a lot more functionality on the iPod itself. I want to be able to delete songs from playlists. I want to be able to sort the music in playlists like I can in iTunes. I want it to be easier to create playlists – it would be easily if I could just click and hold on the volume screen, but no, I have to go back and find the title on the previous screen, which will be quite a hassle if I’m shuffling.
Actually, iTunes does give you many of those possibilites… and several ways to do it.
Open iTunes.
Click on View.
From that menu open the Column Browser submenu.
Choose “Show Column Browser.”
This should put a special column on the left with a list of all the artists you have. When you click on an artist, it gives you a list of all their music. Go back up to that Column Browser submenu and see that you can play around with different ways to use this column browser. Obviously, you can shuffle with any of these groups of music.
Another thing to do, is create Smart Playlists. I like this better. Under the File tab at the top, go to “Create Smart Playlist.” The possibilities are endless. You can make separate playlists for the Stones 63-67, 68-75 and 76-81 within seconds. Maybe a playlist for all of 63. Maybe a playlist for all the Ambient Dream Pop music you have…then of course you shuffle within each smart playlist.
Yes, I know I can create a thousand different playlists and random shuffle among the songs in any of them. I can even go to the artist list, select 1 artist at a time, and shuffle those, but I don’t want to do that. I want more options to shuffle hands-free. And there is no column browser on the iPod – 90% of the time I’m listening to the music it’s there, not on my PC.
On edit – I apologize for an overly-snarky response. I appreciate that you are trying to help.
My “experimental” MP3 player built into my Kindle Touch has no shuffle at all. I wish that were different. The shuffle on all my MP3 players, PC or otherwise, are somewhat lackluster in their shuffle, seemingly less random than I’d care for.
I like the OP’s suggestion of a more qualified shuffle than is generally available. Shuffling by artist or genre would be welcome.
Just for reference, I use a Sansa Fuze, and on my PC, I use AIMP3. I used to use Winamp, but they upgraded that from slim & fast to clunky and fat, so I switched.
I can’t seem to master the task of making a playlist on the Fuze. Can’t do it.
I never used iTunes, or any Apple player. I used to have a Creative Zen that I liked, but it died, hence the Fuze.
Oh, so you meant on the actual iPod. Well, hopefully the development of Siri will lend to this type of interaction. The newest iPod Touches will be shipping with Siri… “Siri, can you shuffle The Ramones for me and start it off with Pet Semetary?”
I am pretty sure that Siri on the 4s doesn’t do this, but it does need to be developed.
Considering that the pseudo-random number generator that comes standard with all Java runtime environments is said to be (possibly proven?) almost perfectly uniformly random, I don’t think how to make a good RNG is a giant secret. You’re probably just noticing patterns where there are none.
(I tried about 5 times to make that as not snarky sounding as possible, that was the best I could get, sorry, no snark meant at all).
Which reminds me (and I don’t know why it would)… I wish that the iPod would remember a bit more from before the last time it was synched. For instance, I have my settings on shuffle songs, but don’t repeat any. After I synch, it forgets which tunes it’s already played so I end up getting repeats. And since I add new music pretty often, I synch pretty often, and the play count eventually shows songs that have been played half a dozen times when bunches of others haven’t been played at all.
I’m not convince of the randomness of the shuffle either – not that they don’t know how to do it, but they choose not to. Somewhere I read that some programs will make note of whether and how many times you’ve skipped a selection, and adjust the shuffle to avoid songs that have been skipped. I dunno if iTunes does this or not, but it DOES keep a “skipped” count.
I like the new iTunes’ “play next” feature. Most of the time, the song I’m listening will inspire the next song I want to hear, and previously there was no way to queue songs so I had to switch once the song ended.
When in the playlist, tap “Edit” at the top of the screen. Red circles with white dashed through the circle should appear to the left of each song title. Tap the circle next to whichever song you wish to delete, and a “Delete” button will appear at the right. You can choose to keep the song by tapping the red circle again, or tap Delete to… delete. When finished deleting songs, tap “Done” at the top of the screen.
There might be a way to do this, but I haven’t found it.
I’d like a simple way to get back to the location I left off in a previous playlist. I create a shuffled playlist on iTunes on my laptop and sync it that way, so it shows up already shuffled on the Pod. I start playing it at the top, but occasionally I’ll decide that I want to listen to the entire album that one of the songs is on, so I go to “Artists”, “Albums”, etc. But then when I go back to the shuffled playlist, I don’t want to start at the beginning again; I want to start where I left off. So I have to scroll my way through it, trying to remember “did I listen to that before I left the list…?” I need a bookmark feature.
I’d also like a Lyrics function, which would scroll the lyrics to the song as it’s playing. “Ohhh- it’s not ‘scuse me while I* kiss this guy’*?”
When I got my first CD player back in the early 1990s, I soon discovered that I wished it had a button I could push that would make it stop/pause, not immediately, but at the end of the song it was currently playing. Surely, I thought, that wouldn’t be too difficult to design.
I have yet to see such a “button” on any music player I’ve used since, and I still want it.
I’d like to use my phone as my music player so i don’t have to carry a separate one, but I’m still using my old iPod classic because it has physical buttons (not to mention 10x the capacity). Touch screens are cool and all, but you have to take it out, unlock it, go to the music player, then hit the virtual buttons. That’s a lot of work just to skip to the next song.
I think it’s a question of what version of the software you have. (rummaging for iPod Touch that hasn’t seen much service since I got my Android phone)
Edit shows up clearly on my Touch, with version 5.1.1 of iOS.
I have an iPod classic, and AFAIK the latest software update, and I don’t have “edit” on any screens.
As far as “play next” – I just updated my iTunes software today because that does sound like a nice function, but I can’t find it. How do you do it? Is it maybe on the Apple but not the PC version?
I presume you mean the “edit” feature rather than the “play next” feature.
I can get an exact equivalent of the “play next” function on my iPod or in iTunes. I can create a new playlist starting with one song (on the iPod it would be an “On-the-Go” playlist), and start playing that song. All I have to do is keep adding one more song to the list as each song plays, and the song I add will be the next one to play. That is, assuming I have shuffle and repeat turned off. In iTunes, I also have to make sure not to sort the playlist by anything, so the latest song I add will just appear on the bottom of the list and the songs will play in the order I added them to the list.
The problem I’ve had with almost all audio players of all types (single-disc CD players, magazine CD changers, carousel CD changers, and every electronic music player I’ve seen) since the early 90s is that even if they label it “shuffle,” it’s actually a “random” mode of picking the next song, which as noted previously is often lackluster in its ability to prevent playing the same songs over and over again.
A true “shuffle” mode would work more the way shuffling a deck of cards works: organize a list of all the available tracks to be played (gather all the cards), arrange them in as random an order as possible (shuffle them), and then execute that order (deal them). An advantage of this would also be that if you decided mid-stream “Hey, I want to hear that last song again” without having to exit the shuffle mode, you could do that.