With our collection, just putting it on shuffle-all is not an option. There is just no mood which in which it’s appropriate to sequence Bill Evans and Jack White and Ute Lemper and Gustav Mahler and PJ Harvey. Not gonna happen.

Tim Bray

Our collection isn’t quite as extensive as Mr. Bray’s (around 8000 songs, although I’m still not sure that I’ve ripped all our CDs), but it is quite possibly just as eclectic. However, I do use shuffle on my iPod, usually when I’m in the car and can’t think of which album I want to listen to. If it comes up with something horrible, I just hit the “forward” button to skip to the next track. Sometimes I end up skipping several tracks. It can be annoying, but sometimes it turns up trumps.

On Friday night the iPod seemed to have decided the right music for driving was trance: it played nothing else for at least 30 minutes. Then, it played one track of odd, haunting, traditional Maronite chant. And then it switched back to trance for another 30 minutes. Strangely, it worked!