DJing with iTunes Party Shuffle

[Haydn]

DJing with iTunes Party Shuffle

As an extensive user of iTunes on the Mac, I've recently tried DJing with iTunes Party Shuffle. I've found out a few useful things about it.

Party Shuffle plays a continuous stream of songs, and you choose which iTunes playlist it sources from. It displays the next 5/10 or so songs to be played (you choose how many are displayed). By clicking the 'Refresh' button you get a different choice. The point is the list of upcoming songs are 'dynamic'.

Fixing songs in the Party Shuffle queue
I've found that you can 'fix' songs in the Party Shuffle queue, so that they stay there even if you press 'Refresh'. This is really useful because you can constantly be managing and changing your upcoming songs.

If you look at the Party Shuffle queue, it looks as though they are fixed. They're not though. But you can 'fix' them by <Control> - clicking and choosing 'Add to Party Shuffle'. Once you've done this, when you press 'Refresh' the songs you've manually 'Added to Party Shuffle' stay there. There's another useful option when you <Control> - click, 'Play Next in Party Shuffle'.

Once you've manually fixed songs in the Party Shuffle queue in this way, you can move them up and down the queue manually by clicking and dragging with the mouse. It's best to hold down the <Command> key while doing this so that you don't accidentally play the song you're moving.

You can also go back to your main iTunes Window and 'Add to Party Shuffle' or 'Play Next in Party Shuffle' from there, either of which also fixes songs in the Party Shuffle queue.

As an alternative, you could set Party Shuffle to display '0' Upcoming Songs, and select everything yourself from the main iTunes window.

I know iTunes is not ideal for DJing, but used in this way, Party Shuffle works well. The only thing it doesn't do is allow you to 'Preview'.

Anyone else use this?