Two Suggested Features for iTunes

Dear Apple,

Thank you for iTunes and iPods. For several years now they have brought music back into my daily life, while running, commuting, shopping, driving and at dinner with my family (not really on the last two). Thank you also for the ‘shuffle’ feature. It turns my iPod into my own personal juke box loaded only with my songs. It’s great to explore and re-discover my own music library through the random play of ‘shuffle’.

But I have two ideas to share with you, that I think would be very well received; rock blocks and linked songs.

Often, hearing a song by an artist makes you crave a little more of the same. Radio stations figured that gimmick out long ago. Why not have an iTunes shuffle setting to allow users to play their own shuffled ‘rock blocks‘? The iPod settings would allow the user to specify how many songs by an artist should be played in a block, 2… 3…4… and voila! The same benefits of shuffle, but with the bonus of blocks.

The second idea struck me while listening to music on my bus ride home. The song I was enjoying was ‘The Crooked Beat‘ from the Album Sandinista! by The Clash. It’s a mellow song about going out to listen to music, rhythmic and sleepy, with some nice horns and trippy echos. And in the last 15 seconds of this 5:29 song, the echos come back strong and a guy shouts out what’s always sounded to me like ‘birddog’, and the pickup in speed leads immediately to the fast opening of ‘Somebody Got Murdered‘, among my many favorites from this album. Only in shuffle mode, it didn’t. My iPod didn’t know any better and randomly pulled something totally wrong for the next song. I wanted to cry. Were I able to do so, I would adjust the settings for ‘The Crooked Beat’ using linked songs to ALWAYS have it be followed by ‘Somebody Got Murdered’. And that is but one of thousands of other songs I would similarly link.

But Chris, you ask… if you’re so eager to hear rock blocks and songs played in their album order, why don’t you just listen to whole albums as you grew up doing? Well, from time to time I still do. I suspect it’s a shrinking audience among iTunes users who think of an ‘album’ as a collection of songs intended to be listened to in sequence. Years ago CD players introduced shuffling and multi-disk options that began the birth of the personal jukebox, and the demise of straight through album listening. But with these features, iTunes could give listeners a nice middle ground between shuffle and album play. I know I’d like them.

Sincerely,

Chris