Best way I found to organize your songs on the shuffle.

[vl-tone]

I don't own a shuffle anymore (I now have a nano), but I sometimes miss its no-brainer one-thumb operation.

I thought I'd share with you how I organized my songs when I had a shuffle, since I think it's one of the best way to use it, and I never read anything similar, though I'm sure I'm not the only one that uses these same methods.

While I appreciate the randomness of the shuffle, there are sometimes where you want to listen to some songs in particular. If you have 100-200 songs, it may require several button presses to get there, up to a hundred clicks for a 200 songs shuffle.

As you may know, if you press the play button 3 times quickly in sequential mode, the shuffle will jump to song 1 on the playlist. This is the only way you can get directly to a particular song, and it can only go to the first song.

So the trick is simple, put all your favorite songs close to the begining AND the end of your playlist:

1                                                                120
|<--Favorites--------------Least Favorite-------------Favorites-->|

That way, by doing the triple-click in sequential mode, you'll instantly get to your most favorite songs. Since the playlist wraps-around, by clicking previous you get to the end of the playlist, and that's why it's a good thing to put favorites there too.

You can simply sort your songs so the closer they are to the start or end, the better they are, in a gradual way.

But here's a variation I adopted at the time:

1                                                                                120
|<--Favorites Playlist-----------Least Favorite-------------New Songs+Favorites-->|

In this variation, the first 20-30 songs are a sub playlist of all-time favorites. In this sub-playlist, the songs are arranged so that the best songs are not necessarily toward the beginning. I also put favorites at the end, but also reserve this area for newly added songs, which get put at the end by default by iTunes. In both methods, the middle songs are average songs that are good candidate for shuffling.

So in shuffle mode, you'll hear least favorites + new and favorites songs. You'll end up listening more to your favorite songs since you also access them easily in the sequential mode, and it's not a bad thing since they are your favorites.

If you need to access a particular song in the middle, just put it in shuffle mode and find one of your least favorite songs, then navigate from there using the sequential mode.

And in case you didn't know, to rearrange the playlist for a shuffle, you have to click on the shuffle icon in iTunes, then make sure the sort order is by song number (click on the appropriate column header). If the sort is by name for example, you won't be able to drag songs and rearrange the playlist.