Two of Us Riding Nowhere

I have a love-hate relationship with my MP3 player.

99.65% of the time, I have at least 25 CDs in my car: 12 in the center console, 2 below my CD player, 5 tucked next to my cupholders, 5 in the side panels, and a minimum of 1 CD riding shotgun. Now, granted, an MP3 player is great for keeping your car clutter-free. And I really like having the variety of music available to me, but without the physical CDs (thus, using an MP3 player), I feel like the music isn't authentic. Sure, you have the thumbnail of the album art and the song titles with your MP3, but you're not able to glance at the back of the actual album to see where exactly you are in the album or brush up on the lyrics while stopped at a stoplight.

Overall, though, my main beef with MP3 players is the "Random" or "Shuffle" feature. To me, when you purchase the album of an artist, you are obligating yourself to listen to a certain selection of songs in a certain order. If the artist didn't care what the tracklisting was or if the songs weren't connected somehow, they would just get released as singles. In a perfect world, artists know exactly how they want you to hear that music, and shuffle totally ruins that environment. Three examples:

1) The way the hey-oh! at the end of the Beatles' "The Continuing Story of Bungalo Bill" flows into "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on the "White Album" is minimalistic genius.

2) The one-two punch of "The Spirit of Radio" and "Freewill" opening up Rush's strongest LP Permanent Waves, two of their greatest FM powerhorses.

3) Coheed and Cambria's sweet and soft ballad "Wake Up" is punctuated by the heavy-hitting "The Suffering" on their prog opus entitled (deep breath) Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV - Volume One: From Fear through the Eyes of Madness.

For me, the arrangement of the songs is just as important as the songs themselves. It defines the personality of the album by offering contrasting sounds, providing a landscape, ebbing and flowing or embracing homogeneity. With actual CDs, you have no choice but to listen to the CD in order. With MP3 players, it's a different story. No one is forced to use shuffle, but if the option's there, who really isn't going to use it some?

The pros of shuffling are many. It gives you your own personal radio station, filled with all the songs and artists you like. The variety enables you to not as easily wear out a song or an album as listening to an album by itself. And most importantly, you may stumble across a song that you haven't heard in a while, inspiring you to re-discover the artist.

However, to reiterate, here's what I can't stand about shuffling. It encourages album promiscuity. With all this bouncing around from artist to artist, you aren't committing to a single album and listening to the piece as it was conceived.

I'll rant later about how I fear the death of the album, but if your MP3 player has been on shuffle for a while, how about you stay put with an album? You may fall in love with the artist all over again. But then again, when I had my MP3 player shuffle only my Rush collection, it was one of the most amazing mixes I have ever heard.

But what do you think? Are you a stayer or a shuffler? Sound off!