I have seen the future, and it is called ShuffleInteresting editorial piece by Leander Kahney over at Wired on the impact of the humble 'shuffle' option has had on the way people use music-listening devices (such as the iPod), which can hold many thousands of songs. He writes...

"Stuffy old listening habits -- like listening to albums from beginning to end -- are being thrown out in favor of allowing machines to choose songs at random, which often leads to unexpected, and magical, juxtapositions of music."

He reports one of his interviewees as saying, "I tend to listen to the iPod on random a great deal of the time.... With a large music collection, it is very easy to forget some of the gems that are in there, and random tends to bring some of those out again."

This is actually something I've found myself doing more and more with my mp3 collection (listened to via humble old WinAmp), as a way of forcing myself to listen tunes off albums I rarely delve into (and as a way of not listening to the same Orbital album over and over again, as I am prone to do at work). Just out of interest, I discovered that, at present, at work, when I load my entire mp3 directory into winamp, I've got 1513 tunes I could potentially listen to. Timewise, that's about 5 or so days of solid listening to get through the whole lot. Considering I'm only at work 8 hours a day, and listen to music for about half of that time, I could go for about 6 weeks before hearing the same track twice.
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