iPod Shuffle Organization
I was having some problems figuring out how I wanted to keep my music organized on a player that has no screen. I really love the shuffle feature and with 30 gigs of music, iTunes can really surprise me with songs I haven't heard in a while. But I wanted a way have the ability to hear more of an artist once it was reached during shuffle play. I was going to sort by artist so they were grouped and when I reached say, Nirvana, while in shuffle mode, I'd swap to “In Order” mode and catch a few more tunes by them, if they exist of course. Theres no reason to have the songs on the Shuffle shuffled, since there of course is an entire playmode devoted to this. The problem was that I want my Podcasts sorted to the very top, so I can find them fast. So that idea was out.
I decided to just keep my Shuffle, shuffled. And dragged my Podcasts to the top for easy access.
Then I had the idea to sort my music by Genre. I thought this would be nice like my artist idea for when in shuffle mode and coming across a genre I wanted to stick with for a bit. The nice part is that while sorted by genre, the songs get sorted by artist as well. I still had to solve the Podcast sorting. They were grouped, just not at the top. So I took all my Podcasts and renamed the genre “_Podcast” and told NetNewsWire 2.0 to rename all my Podcasts to the same. This sorts my Podcasts to the top, groups my music by genre, sorts by artist, and gives me some pretty good control in navigating my iPod Shuffle.
Great post. One thing you may already know about, but didn’t mention, is that you can go back to the top of your song list (while playing “in order”) by pressing “play” three times real fast. I use it to switch between playing songs and Podcasts. I think the shuffle is very underrated because there aren’t enough people like you who consider its possibilities. I predict that it will rise in popularity when more people discover its versatility.
Comment by kadavy — December 27, 2005 @ 9:07 pm