An Amazing New Way to Listen to Your iTunes Collection

Late last week, I discovered a great new way to listen to your iTunes collection (it should also work for most other digital music playing software). It's real easy:

1. Open iTunes
2. Sort by "Artist" (It should automatically group an artist's songs by album -- if not, you may need to choose "Album by Artist" or sort again)
   
3. Uncheck the "Shuffle play" mode
4. Hit the "Play" button and listen to the songs (this is crucial) in sequential order!

This is revolutionary. I may try to submit a patent.

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Sadly, this "discovery" is due to the fact that my primary music device has been a 1-gig iPod shuffle for a while, and my portable behavior has affected my desktop listening behavior.

After being on shuffle mode for so long, I also find that I'm a lot more impatient with songs, hitting "next" after only a few seconds.

Forcing myself to listen to songs in album order really helps when I'm trying to stay in the flow of something -- without some smarter song/beat/genre matching, shuffle can be awfully jarring at times.

Tags: itunes, shuffle