Monday, November 24, 2008

Shit I Hate: The fact that iTunes has removed its shuffle settings

Everyday at work, the only thing that keeps me from walking through a plate glass window and falling 27 stories to a spectacularly memorable death is the fact that I can randomly listen to the 4810 songs on my iPod. I like the fact that I can go months without hearing a song twice. It keeps me spry and on-edge -- ready for anything. Lately, however, I've noticed a change in my iPod. Sure, it's still shuffling songs, but it's not as random as it used to be. Look, I love Heart's "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You" as much as the next guy -- hell, my sixth grade girlfriend and I used to look at each other to that song -- but it loses its panache when I hear it once a day. And no one should be forced to hear two songs in a row from the same album, much less Cypress Hill's Black Sunday. Anyway, I figured that since I had recently downloaded the new iTunes (version 8, I believe), maybe the shuffle settings reset. You see, in the previous versions of iTunes, you could simply go into the settings and there was a sliding bar for the randomness of the shuffle settings: Less Random on one side and More Random on the other. It made perfect sense and, from what I could tell, transferred those settings to my iPod, since I rarely, if ever, heard two songs from the same album within a few days of each other. I liked that. One night last week, I searched the new iTunes for almost an hour looking for that damn bar. I figured maybe I was searching in the wrong menus (or maybe they had moved it or maybe iTunes was a figment of my imagination), so I did some quick online research only to find that I was not alone. The new iTunes has become self-aware and it has removed the ability to control the randomness of shuffle settings. I hate that. Please change it back, iTunes, lest you want to be on the business end of an A to the motherfuckin' K, homeboy.

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