teccy.com

I shuffle you not

I'd hope by now that those who know me would say that I'll give an honest opinion on something when asked (and when not asked too (sorry)) and not to say something is fantastic just because I have one, so I have this to say on the iPod (stupid), the designer of the iPod (stupid) and, therefore, by extension, people who buy the iPod (stupid / unlucky). Why? Well, perhaps I was a bit harsh back when I said those things, but consider this:
You've got several thousand music tracks and only a certain amount of time to listen to them, you've got your favourites but you don't want to hear the same track over and over again, you want to listen to something new, but at the same time you want to select from a particular range of music (genre, for example) a list to be played, a playlist if you will. You want to play a random track from a playlist. Sorry, iPods can't do that. You tell me; Stupid, or not? Bear in mind that I'm talking about (I think) the sixth iPod variant here.

In my defence and that of other unsupecting iPod owners out there, who knew? I mean, who'd have thought that any sort of music player wouldn't have a half decent shuffle mode? I should say at this point that it is possible to play a random track from the entire library of those available but want kind of mood would you have to be in to want Handel -> Snoop Dogg -> Shola Ama?!
I realise that I'm in danger of generalising from my specific case; Believing that everyone listens to their iPod in the same way I do. The thing is, the only built-in way I can see of avoiding starting from scratch every time is to have no play lists and just have the whole collection laid out before you. Secondly, when you start looking around, lots of people (more than three, anyway) are having this problem.

The question now is, would I have changed my purchasing decision if I'd known about this sooner? Probably not, but that's only because the competition is so very weak:
Someone make a portable media player with a four inch screen that can play wma, mp3, aac, flac and ogg, that has an interface that doesn't need four thumbs and a degree in quantuum physics and that has a dock connector for connecting to a car / hi-fi / PC, stick wi-fi in there too, what the hell, it's Christmas and a 80GB hard drive. Oh, and that can be left charging without being a fire risk as Creatives Xen Xtra is (the instructions say not to leave it charging because there's a danger of over charging. Eh? Say what now?)

That turned into a bit of a rant didn't it? Still, right now my iPod is playing All Saints (begins with an 'A', you see) through my seperates stack while being controlled by the remote I got for Christmas (thanks Scott) and there's no other player that can do that.

There are supposedly work-arounds for the random playlist 'feature' so I'm going to take a look at those and I'll report back for posterity if I find anything that works.

posted by Tim @ 8:21 pm