The party's over...

The iPod has this feature called "Party Shuffle." It is supposed to play songs at random from you entire collection of music. This is one of the things that attracted me to getting one of these things - a lot of times I'm not interested in listening to an entire album. Party Shuffle mixes things up pulling in songs from anywhere in your music library. That's where the whole "Friday Random Ten" thing came from across the blogistan.

But it really doesn't work that well. I've got over 3,000 songs loaded at this point but it seems Party Shuffle plays pretty much the same 200 to 300 songs. And it is constantly falling into a rut. It will fixate on one album and play songs off that album all day.

Then an idea hit me. Why not turn off the "shuffle" function and just go to the master list of songs and start playing them alphabetically. Think about it. If the songs are listed alphabetically by title, then the bands and albums are going to be all mixed up. And you can be quaranteed to not hear any repeats and to ultimately hear every song you got on the thing.

This has proven to be very satisfying, I've heard dozens of songs in the past few days that I have never heard before on the thing. The only hangup concerns "live" recordings. If you have both the studio version and the live version of a song, they are going to be listed back to back in the alphabetical file and thus play back to back. Haven't decided what to do about that yet - maybe rewrite the live songs with quotations so that they will line up in another part of the list. Anyway, since the Party Shuffle is over, this brings us to...

FRIDAY ALPHABETICAL TEN



"Always See Your Face" - Love

"Amazing Journey/Sparks" - The Who (Tommy)

"Amazing Journey/Sparks" - The Who (Live at Leeds)

"Amazona" - Roxy Music

"America" - Simon and Garfunkel

"American Beauty" - Thomas Newman

"American Idiot" - Green Day

"American Tango" - Weather Report

"American Woman" - Guess Who

"Amoreena" - Elton John