Random Audio
I bought a Samsung MP3 player. I love this thing. It does not have a swappable battery and it charges off USB 5 volts, so you have to have your PC on to charge the player. That’s not a problem with me as I have sever PCs, some of which never turn off, but it might be for some folks, especially if someone didn’t have a home PC. They say the battery lasts 10 hours. I don’t know, I’ve never listened to it until battery depletion, but I have turned it off incorrectly a couple of times and then went to use it and it was dead. It is quite small and I do use a lanyard for it, but I had to use one of the badge lanyards I had picked up from going to SEO conferences like Pubcon and SES. It has plenty of volume even for my shot out ears.
I have it packed halfway with music and halfway with audio books. The music I’m listening to is The Cranberries, Eminem, 50 cent, Metallica, Bob Marley, Queen, U2, plus a mix of some recent pop, like the Black Eyed Peas’ My Hump, and Billy Crawford’s Bright Lights. The audio books I’ve been putting on it are Malcolm Gladwell, Jarred Diamond, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and some not so recent but always good ones like Richard Feynman, Dale Carnegie, Victor Franki, Zig Ziglar. Truman Capote, and Winston Churchill.
I have the player set to play randomly, and it does this very well. It keeps me in a state of expectation. I seem to enjoy the way the music gets mixed with the audio book content. I especially like the way that some books are broken down into coherent little chapters, and the way that I hear these chapters out of order. I still will listen to the whole book, maybe even twice, but it comes to me differently than if I just listened to one whole audio book from beginning to end.
I wonder how this would work with fiction works? Listening to the chapters randomly?
I usually read from a stack of 3 or 4 or more books. I’ve previously had as many as 12 books I was reading at the same time. Some might take months to read, some might be read in a week or less. Books are kind of hard to keep track of which parts you’ve read if you don’t read them linearly from cover to cover. You would have to record what chapters or pages you had read to do so efficiently. I don’t have to do this with an MP3 player. I know that it will randomly play files until it has gone through all of them.