Skipping a playlist when shuffling

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Skipping a playlist when shuffling

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Q: I have a 120GB iPod Classic, and I have a question about the “Shuffle” settings. I have almost 4500 songs thus far, and a tenth of it is jazz that I would rather not listen to all the time. I have created a jazz playlist containing all of those songs, but the songs still come into the rotation when my iPod is on “Shuffle Songs” mode. Is there any way to tell my iPod to shuffle all songs EXCEPT the ones in my jazz playlist?

- Emily

A: Although the iPod itself cannot exclude an entire playlist from the global shuffle mode, there are a couple of different ways that you can work around this problem.

Firstly, you can tag any individual track to be skipped when you are shuffling songs on your iPod. This is done through iTunes, and can be done either for an individual track, or a selected group of tracks. To do this, simply select the track(s) you would like to be skipped when shuffling, and choose File, Get Info from your iTunes menu.

The disadvantage to this approach, however, is that it must be set on a per-track basis, so while you can set every track in your Jazz playlist to be skipped when shuffling, this setting will not automatically be applied to any new tracks you may add - you’ll have to modify these manually as you add them.

Another option is to build a Smart Playlist that includes all of the music on your iPod except for your Jazz playlist, and then shuffle your playback from within that playlist, rather than using the Main Menu “Shuffle Songs” option. A Smart Playlist similar to the following would do the trick:

You could then simply turn on Shuffle on your iPod from the Settings menu, and begin playing music from this playlist, rather than choosing “Shuffle Songs” from the main menu. Note that on the newer iPod models like the iPod classic you can also toggle Shuffle mode while listening to any given playlist right from the “Now Playing” screen by pressing the center button until the Shuffle options appear.

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