mike[space] dot net

Ever since I bought my iPhone, my approach to listening to music has been changing. When you have a vast collection of music, and a device with limited storage, you need to find a way of selecting music to go on that device. The approach I've taken is to start using the ratings mechanism - anything I've rated at 3 stars or over is automatically synced to the phone. I then have a random selection of music from the remainder (minus anything I have rated at 1 or 2 stars).

If I'm in the mood to do some rating of my music, I stick the unrated playlist on shuffle, and try to remember to rate each tune as I hear them. But now that I've built up a good solid list of rated tunes, I quite often listen to the rated playlist on shuffle. This is great, as you wind up with a personalised mix of your favourite tunes. It can be not so great though, as my tastes can be quite varied, and suddenly having Mozart's Requiem come on during a party can be a bit weird.

But I digres, the point is that fairly often, a song will come on and I'll think "I'd love to listen to the rest of that album now". But there's no way of quickly switching to the album from your current playlist. Of course, a secondary problem to this is that I might not have the rest of the album on synced, so it would also be nice if you could have some kind of rule which pulls all songs in from the same album if one of the songs is rated.

Anyone know if there are any apps that provide that kind of functionality? I'm sure there's nothing for the iphone, but it'd be good to have on the laptop.

Case in point - Lucky by Radiohead has just come on - immediately want to listen to the rest of the album ;-)