iPod: The Missing Manual, 7th Edition

Shuffle Your Music in Many Ways

With its sometimes uncanny ability to randomly pluck and play songs that just seem perfect together, the Shuffle feature has won over a huge number of fans, especially those who don't want to think about what to listen to as they noodle around the Internet. To start shuffling just click the twisty arrows icon down on the bottom-left corner of the iTunes window.

You're not stuck with a single shuffling method, either. Some days you may feel like mixing up your music song by song, and other days you may be more in a mood to change things up by album.

You can control just what you shuffle by choosing ControlsShuffle and selecting Songs, Albums, or Groupings from the submenu. (As explained in the next chapter, Grouping is a way to keep certain tracks together in your iTunes library, like separate movements that are part of a larger work in the Classical music category.)