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Pressing shuffle ........

fegs

fegs

pfm Member
Well, do we or don't we?

It's something I can't bring myself to do

I realise it's originally a CD and more recently a streaming thing but I just can't do it it!

I'm firmly in the "As the artist intended it" camp and love to hear an album in its intended order

It's probably one of the many reasons I prefer vinyl due to the inability to shuffle

I love it when one "Knows" an album and what's coming next, shuffle ruins this in my humble opinion

so come on who's a shuffler?
 
When I first got a CD player in the 80s I very much was. As well as liking not knowing what's coming next there was the technology side of it, allowing you to play the album in any random or any other order you like, which LP and tape couldn't. And those green lights that went round in circles on the display.
 
When I regularly used an mp3 player I used to quite like pressing shuffle now and then - it was fun not knowing what was coming up and a great way to be reminded of stuff you'd forgotten about.
 
It works particularly well with live albums, where the band can start with their sensitive ballad and the huge roar of greeting comes halfway through the performance. And prog albums with 25 minute epics that are sliced into different parts on the CD and so get played back in a strange order interspersed with the shorter, less meaningful offerings. Opera takes on a post-modern style when everyone dies in the first two minutes and you then treat the rest of the piece as a flashback presented in random order.
 
If I’m listening to Spotify as background then I just have a play list. I generally listen to a full album in its order on the main rig, however, I will skip a track I don’t like. I usually stop any listening at 10pm so may play a 20 minute selection from a favourite artist; this often Louis Armstrong.
 
I use(d) shuffle on my iPhone on the bus or train and really enjoy it in that environment. It’s a 128GB iPhone full with music so room for plenty of decent quality (mainly lossless) albums. I tend only to stick albums on it that would work with background noise, so rock, electronica, jazz etc, no long-form classical etc. Shuffle works pretty well in this environment, but at home I play the LP or CD/SACD. I don’t subscribe to any streaming service, though I watch a lot of stuff on Youtube, usually whole gigs.
 
Soon after I got all the CDs ripped to the server (Jeez, what a ballache that was....), I set the whole thing (around 80,000 tracks) on shuffle.
It was really interesting to see what cropped up - nice reminders, odd and/or pleasing juxtapositions; so I do it once on a while to reset what I listen to.
I also like the fact that as most things are a tap and a swipe away; so if I'm reminded of a tune whilst playing another, it's there before I forget it again.

Though, most of the time, I'll listen to an album as intended (as Lindsey Buckingham intended (c) The Mighty Boosh).
 
I shuffle from my DLNA server all the time, it has shedloads of stuff on it I would otherwise forget about. But I never shuffle an individual album.
 
When I had an old iPod, with a much older version of iOS on it, I used to shuffle by album. That way I listened to whole albums but would never know which album was next. It’s a real shame Apple decided to remove this option.
 
Defo not - which I think probably stems from being an old prog rocker at heart where many of the albums are concept pieces and shuffling would be the equivalent to reading a book in random chapter order.
I do enjoy compiling playlists and saving them though.
 
I can only do full albums I never got into the shuffle thing, or playlists even on the streaming side of things.
 
90% shuffle for me. I even have auto playlists that shuffle with every save.

But then I still buy singles (three today).
 
Never shuffle.

Even with my iPod classics.

I prefer to choose, usually whole albums, or at least the A-Side.

Never listen to curated playlists, I am unable to see the point.
 
I got bored with shuffling tracks after…ooh…maybe 13 years of it.

At home my background listening source is iTunes running on Windows, Airplaying files from my NAS to whichever system I’m nearest to. iTunes’ shuffle by album feature really is like both possessing and digesting the cake for me: whole albums, but none of that paralysis by choice for what comes next.

Away from home I’ve got a playlist of albums sorted by title, which prolly provides the closest approximation to not knowing what album’s coming next that iOS offers. I did briefly consider adding a random number per album to an unused tag field and seeing if that would do the trick, but the levels of faff involved made sorting by title seem an acceptable substitute.
 
Use shuffle 90% of the time where its like that perfect radio station - it only plays tracks you like, there's no inane DJ's prattling on about their empty lives, there's no punter's ringing up about their empty lives, no weather reports (I can look out the window), no annoying jingles & no adverts for goods or services that I am never likely to use.
 
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