Manifesto

Do you know what feature I want (besides crossfading on the iPod) in a future version of iTunes?

Well, it's more like a revision of an existing feature. Forgive me if you're not familiar with iTunes or don't know what the hell I'm talking about (if that's the case, I'm sorry, you'll find the following totally boring. You may continue watching Father of the Pride or Hawaii now).

Anyway, you play a song in iTunes (or on your iPod) and one cool thing it does is it keeps track of when that song has played.

The problem is that iTunes doesn't count the song as "played" until the whole song has played. Now that's all fine and dandy, but take this scenario for example: you're listening to your iPod (or again, iTunes on your computer) in Shuffle Mode, and some random song pops up. But you don't really feel like listening to Andy Gibb's Shadow Dancing right at the moment, so after a few seconds, you skip to the next track, Charlene's I've Never Been To Me.

What this means: iTunes doesn't consider the song you just skipped as "played" because you didn't play Shadow Dancing all the way through.

This messes up my system of hearing new and fresh songs on my iPod. I created a playlist on my iPod called Haven't Heards. It's a smart playlist feature in iTunes that chooses all the songs on my iPod that haven't been played in over a month (this time amount is programmable). Can you see where this is going? Let's get back to Andy...

While the Haven't Heards smart playlist picks all the songs that I haven't played on my iPod in over a month, along comes Shadow Dancing so I skip the song 'cause like I said, I didn't feel in the mood. So I skip it to the next random track but get this: to the iTunes brain, the song isn't considered "played" because it didn't play all the way through 'till the end. What that means is that the song (as well as others that I've skipped along the way) would more than likely pop up again due to the randomness of the "Shuffle Mode" and the universe. Shadow Dancing will, dammit, WILL, somehow show up again in Shuffle Mode.

So what I propose is a slight modification in the "song played" parameter within the iTunes program, say maybe mark a song as "played" after its first 5-10 seconds instead of having it play all the way through until the end.

Okay. Alright. Now that I got that out of my system, back to Father of the Pride.