iTunes Party Shuffle
Party Shuffle in iTunes is great. I pull out my laptop on the bus, plug in my headphones, and Party Shuffle my way to work. From an interaction standpoint, Party Shuffle is like hiring a DJ who has to do whatever you tell him to do. This is how it works:
- Party Shuffle “proposes” 15 random upcoming songs and starts playing the first one. Then your personal Party Shuffle DJ gives you the list.
- You start scanning down the list of songs, and you scratch off the list anything you don’t want.
- If you don’t even want to hear the song that’s playing, you can scan down and find the first song you do want to hear, and play from there instead.
- When you jump down the list or delete some songs, your Party Shuffle DJ picks more songs to fill up the list to 15 (like getting more Scrabble tiles).
As if that wasn’t enough, if you happen to go spelunking through your music library and find a song you want, you can choose to “Play Next in Party Shuffle” or “Add to Party Shuffle.” Apparently, there’s even some way that you can have multiple people adding and deleting songs at the same time listening over a network. But that’s like having more than one person fighting over the list of CDs the DJ has (but on the other hand, don’t worry, he’s got enough copies to go around).
The benefit to me is that I don’t have to choose songs from my list of several thousand. Instead, I only have to pick one out of the 6 or 7 that I scan, or pick 4 or 5 out of the next 10. When I pick songs from the library, I usually start with an artist that I have a lot of songs from and listen to a bunch, ignoring the artists that I only have one song from because they take longer to search through and recognize, but with Party Shuffle I get an even mix.
Whose job was it to design Party Shuffle?
