[Big Mac]

When you go to iTunes or your iPod and don't know what you want to hear beforehand, what's your preferred mode/strategy? Do you do a shuffle of your full library? Party Shuffle? Go for a random album? Or do you find a specific song to listen to?

I like Party Shuffle (almost forgot about that one). My brother seems to strongly prefer seeking out individual songs he wants to hear.

[Chuckit]

I always choose. Usually I'll listen to a few songs by an artist at a time. I guess one of the benefits of liking good groups is that you don't need to switch after every track.

[ort888]

Always shuffle. I have an 90 gig music library and all of my songs are meticulously organized and rated.

I have a series of smart playlists that funnel into a master list that plays me a mix based on my rating and how long it has been since I last heard the song. I think it's about 12 smart playlists that all go into 1.

[Person Man]

Depends on what mood I'm in.

Usually I'll do shuffle, but there are always times when I want to hear a specific song, and depending on whether I want to hear related songs (from the same album), I'll drill down to either the song itself or via the album.

If there is a bunch of new music (i.e. recently loaded music that I haven't listened to yet), I'll listen to a special "Never Played" smart playlist. That list is also set to shuffle.

[Dakar V]

When I don't know what I want, I browse my last.fm profile til I come up with something.

[Peter]

I always shuffle by artist.

[Dakar V]

Also, my library is too burdensome to shuffle in full. I have a few specialized playlists to aid the selection process (shuffle till you hit something you really want to listen to).

I like personally selecting a string of songs to hear, but on the iPod its too burdensome to do more than like 5 in a row.

Edit: too burdensome!

[Railroader]

Artist. That will give me a good idea in what I am interested in listening to if I am unsure.

[Mac User #001]

I Shuffle mostly.

I've been known to randomly search my iTunes library until I find a song I want to listen to though, and then the songs following that will play and I tend to leave it until a song comes I don't want to hear, repeating the process.

[Wiskedjak]

In the rare times that I listen to music on my iPod, it's in shuffle, sometimes branching off to a particular artist from shuffle. Usually, though, I'm listening to podcasts and I'm using on-the-go playlists.