Dear iTunes, Please bend to my will.

[rsadelle]

So here's what I want: when I have iTunes on shuffle, I want it to display the list of songs in the order they're playing. It will do this for an individual playlist, but not for a folder or for the entire music library. Is this just something it does not do, or am I missing an option somewhere?

(I also still wish it would put the song name in the window title bar so I could hover over minimized iTunes and find out what's playing without having to switch windows, but I've wanted that forever and Winamp was the only player that ever did that anyway.)

Comments

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

Why not just use iTunes DJ, or create an "Everything" playlist? (I have that because I have my library auto set to repeat the same song over and over again. My "Everything" playlist is defaulted to shuffle.) Also...folder? How can you have a folder on iTunes...?

As for the title, why not get one of those external programs that announces everything? I use Growl (http://growl.info/), but I'm sure there's probably something similar for a PC.

[rsadelle]

Hmm. I've never used the DJ. I'm trying it out now. I have to admit it weirdly makes me nervous not to see the whole list of everything, only the last/next 100 songs. (This is completely irrational.) I think I would forget to add new things to an Everything playlist.

People always look at me weirdly when I talk about folders in iTunes, which means I must use it differently than other people. See, I have a lot of playlist folders with playlists (and sometimes other playlist folders) inside them. Some of this is organizational - all mixes, for example, are in a folder so on days when I don't want to see it, I can collapse the folder and not look at them - but it's mostly to make shuffling easier. For example, each Christian Kane album has its own playlist (with another one for Misc Kane), and they're all in a Kane folder, which is then inside a Kane, Carlson, and Friends folder, so I can easily listen to just one album, or have iTunes shuffle just Kane songs, or have it shuffle Christian Kane, Steve Carlson, and Friends (Jason Manns and The Life of Riley) together. Is this not what other people do?

Hmm. I don't know that I want something announcing everything. I don't even need to know what every song playing is, just sometimes I'm listening and it's not a song I know well and I want to know what it is.

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

People always look at me weirdly when I talk about folders in iTunes, which means I must use it differently than other people.

OMG!!! I didn't do this because I had no idea this capability existed at all! I just looked now, and it's there! Who knows how long! Wow! This should prove very useful! I have no idea how to address your question, though, since I haven't played with it, but I'm going to give it a try now.

I think I would forget to add new things to an Everything playlist.

No, not an ordinary playlist: make a smart playlist. Just about all the playlists I listen to are smart playlists. The rule for my everything playlist is "Add everything whose year is not 9999". Since I don't have any songs whose year is 9999, it adds every other song whose year isn't that (including those that have blank years). In other words, it automatically adds everything in my library to the playlist; I don't have to add stuff to it when I add new songs.

Hmm. I've never used the DJ. I'm trying it out now. I have to admit it weirdly makes me nervous not to see the whole list of everything, only the last/next 100 songs. (This is completely irrational.)

Well, to be honest, I don't like it, either, but I thought I'd mention it...

[rsadelle]

Huh. I wonder if playlist folders are something they introduced in a later version and everyone else was used to just using the + to add playlists, where I came late to iTunes and went to the file menu and found folders as an option.

I've never messed with smart playlists (my attitude towards iTunes has definitely been: just play the music!); I might have to give that a try.

It's possible the DJ is just as random as everything on shuffle, but it felt less random, so I'm back to just putting the music library on shuffle.

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

It's possible the DJ is just as random as everything on shuffle, but it felt less random, so I'm back to just putting the music library on shuffle.

Gah! I felt the exact same thing! I swear, that DJ thing must have some use... (It used to have a different name, too.) Genius lists aren't too bad, though (and they do have the numbers so you can see what's coming up).

I've never messed with smart playlists (my attitude towards iTunes has definitely been: just play the music!); I might have to give that a try.

They are definitely worthwhile. Here are some of my smart playlists:

• An easy one: Play every song that was recorded or composed by band/person X. This grabs all their music and all the covers of their music.


• Best of the Best: Grabs the 100 songs that have the highest star rating and the highest play count.


• Infrequent: Grabs the 4,000 songs with the lowest play count.


• Studio Albums of X: Sometimes I don't want to listen to live performances, so since every live performance I have is of the format "X (Live)", I just grab every song by a particular band that doesn't have (Live) in the title.


• Genre Lists: Grab everything of X genre.


• Decade Lists: Grab everything whose year is 1990 to 1999 for the 90s, 1980 to 1989 for the 80s, etc.


• Grouping Lists: I love the grouping feature, which was added...somewhat recently. I have tons of lists that grab particular groups. For example, I have a group "12" that I add to every song that's 12 bar blues. Then I have a smart playlist collect them. The nice thing about groupings is that they can be anything. I have a group called "Erin" which is music that Erin likes.

So those are just some ideas. I've been playing with folders now (really helped, by the way; was able to consolidate a lot of my playlists), but I haven't found a way around the problem. :( Seems silly. There should be a way to get those numbers on there...

[rsadelle]

Hmm. None of those sound like things I want, though! I usually want to either randomly play things from the whole library, or play specific playlists or artists or artist groups that I have in folders for that specific purpose.