When the Party is Over

[OK, I've thought of several names for this post that are dramatically misleading. I apologize.]

I use iTunes to interface with my iPod and to provide background music to parts of my life, particularly the Sabbath hours. I've scanned in a few of our CDs, including several choral recordings. I can write a comment about tracks, individually or as a group, and the comment pertinent to this discussion is "Sacred, choral".

I can then use iTunes to create a playlist of all tracks with a comment that includes those words. iTunes has a Party Shuffle feature that selects tracks at random from this playlist, and so we can go through the Sabbath hours with a decent variety of sacred choral music to listen to. (By the way, iTunes has an option to shuffle by grouping, so I can make sure that all movements of a symphony or string quartet, for example, or of a requiem, are played together.)

The one feature that I most missed is this: when it's time to turn off the music, there's no way to tell iTunes to stop at the end of the current track. The only "stop" option is essentially "stop now."

Last night, I hit upon a solution! I created an empty playlist. Now, when it's time to turn off the music, I tell Party Shuffle to select tracks at random from the empty playlist. It gripes about emptiness and futility, but the intended effect is achieved. The music ends at the end of the current track.