Directed Shuffle
The iPod, or any media player, really, could use a feature in its shuffle mode to allow you to tag a song as always being followed by a specific song of your choosing.
Most adjacent songs on albums don’t flow together so much that you’d notice or care, but when they do it’s horribly jarring when the merciless algorithm of the shuffle destroys your anticipation.
For example, iTunes doesn’t know, but I’d be happy to tell it, that “The Crane Wife 1&2″ has to be followed by “Sons and Daughters”. Just like I’d tell it that “Holland, 1945″ must be followed by “Communist Daughter”, that “The House That Guilt Built” has to be followed by “Happy”, and that “Middle” has to be followed by “Born in ‘69″ which has to be followed by “On a Rope”.
As you can see, I think about deeply, deeply important things when walking home from work, yes?
(Note: I would have posted mp3s for all of the above, but the last time I did something like that it got linked to on The Hype Machine, which blew through 4Gb of my account’s bandwidth in 12 hours and was quickly followed by an email from my hosting company detailing the frankly terrifying overage charges which would be applied if the situation were to continue…)