Do the Album Shuffle

For the past twenty years or so, I've been carrying my music with me. First I had cassette tapes on various walkmans, then I carried CDs with me on portable CD players. Five years ago I bought my first iPod. The big change was that in the years BiP (Before iPod), I had to choose which music to take with me. AiP I could have it all. Every morning BiP I stood in front of my CD collection, or my cassette collection before that, and chose the albums to take with me. I've always been an album person and I rarely bought best-of albums. The main reason for this is that I like to hear all the numbers in the context the artist intended them to be. That's also the reason why I do not like shuffle mode on CD players. It messes with the artist intent. And so, BiP, I listened to complete albums sequentially before changing them in my player. AiP, after I switched everything to my iPod, I continued to listen to complete albums, manually selecting them from the menu. That is until I discovered that I could select shuffle per album. Now the tedious task of standing in front of my CD collection was taken over by the iPod. When I now click shuffle songs on my iPod, I get a randomly selected album which I then can enjoy. And because I have only my music on my iPod, its all good music. So it doesn't matter what album it selects.

In the past week I received my Apple-TV. This device contains everything that iTunes contains plus all my pictures. In fact it contains everything my 5.5G iPod has. It has my movies, TV-shows, podcasts, pictures and of course, it has all my music. And naturally it has shuffle. Unfortunately, I cannot shuffle per album. So now I run the risk of getting Led Zeppelin straight after a Bach recital. Hopefully Apple will address this issue soon.

Zaaf