Friday, April 25, 2008

iPhone Gotcha - Can't Turn Off Shuffle

One of the nice features of the iPhone is that as you open each playlist, or album, or artist there is a "Shuffle" option at the top, automatically. Click it and it plays shuffled. Click elsewhere and it plays in line. So imagine my surprise when suddenly no matter what I did, every playlist, artist, etc. was shuffling! Not a big deal when playing the latest musical album, but quite a problem when trying to listen thru an audiobook or other arrangement with sequential sections. Luckily, the answer was online...

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071115065453AAFqgKd

...basically, when you play a track, you have the option to "tap" the album art. If you do so, additional controls will appear. Among them are repeat, the time line of the song, and a shuffle control. Apparently, if the shuffle is set here IT STAYS HERE until you unset it in this same place. Since these controls only appear if tapped for, this is not obvious later.

A good tip for the iPhone users out there. And a reminder that even Apple sometimes makes a boneheaded move in UI design.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Ditto on the thanks. That was making me crazy!

Anonymous said...

Thank you, like the others, this was driving me nuts!

Anonymous said...

THANKS SOOOOOOO MUCH!!! was driving me mad.. took half hour to find this post on the internet... x