::party shuffle an empty playlist in iTunes:: [/tech/mac] (14:09)

Sometimes the answer to a long running problem is so simply you can't imagine how it escaped you for so long. I've been a half fan of party shuffle in iTunes. It's nice when I want a completely random experience, but usually I'm a bit more guided.

I'll be listening to to Ozma and then suddenly get the urge to listen to Fleming and John. And somewhere along the lines I'm decide that I'd like some Ramones in the mix. I don't want to suddenly stop the train of songs, I just want to queue up some music for later in the day.

Unfortunately, party shuffle only works over playlists. (or your entire library) I don't want to maintain a playlist for something like this. What are the odds that I'm going to want this set of music again anytime soon? Not likely. You can add songs to party shufle, but iTunes will mix that in with new songs from your library.

It's driven me crazy until today when suddenly the completely obvious popped into my head. Why not assign an empty playlist to party shuffle? Then iTunes will never shuffle in anything. I can queue up music to my hearts content knowing that iTunes will purge the played songs out. It's exactly the behavior I've been wanting - a low maintenance guided stream of songs.

So, I am happy that I'm able to get iTunes to do something I've always wanted it to do, but I'm greatly frustrated that it has taken me several months to figure out something so trivial and obvious.

But sometimes I'm just slow. Here's another example. I've been going crazy dealing with the annoying dock bounce in iTerm 0.8.1. If iTerm gets output in a terminal window when it doesn't have focus, it bounces to get your attention. The net result is if you do something (say a CVS checkout) in a terminal window and then go over to check email, you will have to sit and stare at a bouncing dock for the next 5 minutes. There's no way to turn it off, so iTerm 0.8.1 is really completely unusable.

I've gone to the iTerm site almost daily, hoping and praying that they would put out a new version that fixes the bug. It's been fixed in CVS for quite some time, so today I wandered over and decided "OK, I'm going to build my own version from source" because that's obviously the simplest solution, right? As I started downloading, it suddenly dawned on me to just download 0.8 and use that instead. There's nothing new in 0.8.1 I needed anyways, and who knows what is lurking in CVS.

I did just that, and all my problems were solved. I can actually use iTerm again. It's amazing how stupid I can be, ignoring the most obvious and simple solutions, when I get frustrated by an application.