My 5th generation iPod and it’s predecessor the Creative Zen Xtra both have/had a great feature that I used practically every day. This feature, Album Shuffle, was ideal for someone like myself who prefers to listen to a whole album as it was released rather than just a random song. I also have a number of live recordings that need to be played in order. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided to disable the shuffle by album feature in both the iPhone and iPod Touch. Did you notice how I say ‘disable’ and not ‘remove’? The feature is present in the .plist file for Settings.app but this is only available to jailbroken phones and those with access to Xcode – which dramatically reduces the number of people it is available to. It also requires connecting to a Mac every time you want to change your shuffle mode from ‘by album’ to ‘by track’ so is no good when you’re on the road.
So, what are the other options? Well, as Apple rightly advertise: ‘There’s an App for That’ although in this case there are 3 that do the job and are currently available in the UK AppStore. In alphabetical order we have: ‘Album Mixer – Shuffle by Album‘, ‘iAlbum Player‘ and ‘Quick Music‘.
As an amateur musician playing both electric and acoustic guitar and also a doting dad with a weekly ‘gig’ singing to nursery children it is quite important to keep my guitars in tune. When using my acoustic guitar the last thing I want to do is fish out my tuner and guitar lead and then inevitably replace the batteries in order to get in tune. I always have my iPhone with me and because I use it as my main phone it is also always charged up; so I went on the hunt for a guitar tuner.
