iTunes DJ
Macworld, via Gruber, brought to my attention something wonderful about iTunes 8.1:
With iTunes DJ, iPhone users that have Apple’s Remote application installed can request songs to be played. Users can also vote to control when songs are played.
I will never again have to worry about somebody taking the iTunes computer and cutting from the party playlist to Soulja Boy on infinite repeat.
Mar 12 2009
12:54 am
I spent a long time thinking about the difficult problem of music in a shared setting- how, with minimum interference, can a set of people with diverse musical tastes agree on what to play (as well as share the songs with a central server responsible for ‘tunes’)
Chatting about it, and musical tastes, with a co-worker, I expoused my love of hyper-peppy Norwegian bubblegum pop, Liverpool electroclash, and the Electric Six- his list involved a lot of R&B, Gangsta’ rap, and (worst of all) Country.
We rather rapidly came to the conclusion that the technological marvel best suited to our problem was (and always will be) headphones.
My time at The Peak reaffirmed this solution, having exhausted my lifetime supply of ‘ability to listen to Sigur Ros or Death Cab for Cutie’.
Mar 12 2009
9:40 am
This is a good point. However, at a house party, giving everybody headphones with their own choice of music would probably decrease, rather than increase, the quality of the party.
I think the best approach is for the party organizer to make a relatively extensive playlist of a few hours of tracks that span genres, but focuses on the “middle ground” of your guests. This means taking out the extremes – Revolution 9, anything describable as hardcore, those tracks that you only like if you know the band, anything sad, etc.
The biggest problem with this is somebody who just can’t survive without some rap or needs to sing/dance to some pop right now. iTunes DJ seems like it’ll fill that well.