As my regular readers will now by now, I am a big fan of a lot of new technology. Maybe it is just growing up with Star Trek (where automatic sliding doors were just about as impressive as teleportation), but I really really like the email, mp3-players, the Internet (with Wikipedia, music sites, etc), gps, smartphones with apsolutely fantastic aps, streaming videos, etc etc. But there are a few aspects of modern technology that I don't like, and the shuffle feature is one of them. Whoever invented that should be put up against the wall ... and left there!
To be fair, the shuffle we know from mp3-players is really only the latest incarnation of the same feature for CDs. And that in turn was just an automation of something people already did manually, with vinyl records. Of course, those people also belong up against the wall (and certainly anybody who did that to my records - I won't name any names, but you know who you are!).
Possibly the worst type of shuffle - the multi-disk CD player switch randomly between CDs - has mostly disappeared, thankfully. I still remember (with the sort of utter horror that makes me wish Hitchcock was still here to recount it) settling in, happy and relaxed, to Glenn Gould's rendition of the Goldberg variations by Bach, only to have my eardrums assaulted by some Wagnerian sporano.
Nowadays, you can limit the random play to individual albums, which is better, but still not good: the songs were actually put in that order for a reason, the same way that the pieces of a symphony have an order. And I have gotten used to that order. So much so, that I often "hear" the beginning of the next song on an album as soon as the previous one ends.
Of course, you could also argue that I am just old-fashioned, that I have gotten used to a certain order and am too inflexible, that I should be out playing shuffleboard with the other pensioners. Fine, whatever. As long as there is wifi ...
To be fair, the shuffle we know from mp3-players is really only the latest incarnation of the same feature for CDs. And that in turn was just an automation of something people already did manually, with vinyl records. Of course, those people also belong up against the wall (and certainly anybody who did that to my records - I won't name any names, but you know who you are!).
Possibly the worst type of shuffle - the multi-disk CD player switch randomly between CDs - has mostly disappeared, thankfully. I still remember (with the sort of utter horror that makes me wish Hitchcock was still here to recount it) settling in, happy and relaxed, to Glenn Gould's rendition of the Goldberg variations by Bach, only to have my eardrums assaulted by some Wagnerian sporano.
Nowadays, you can limit the random play to individual albums, which is better, but still not good: the songs were actually put in that order for a reason, the same way that the pieces of a symphony have an order. And I have gotten used to that order. So much so, that I often "hear" the beginning of the next song on an album as soon as the previous one ends.
Of course, you could also argue that I am just old-fashioned, that I have gotten used to a certain order and am too inflexible, that I should be out playing shuffleboard with the other pensioners. Fine, whatever. As long as there is wifi ...
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