A a a a a Very Good Song
For some vehicles, when an iPhone is plugged into the car’s USB port music playback begins automatically, and it always starts in alphabetical order at the top of the user’s iTunes library. Because of this, many users will hear the same song, usually beginning with an “A,” over and over again each time they plug their iPhone into their car. This week, a potential solution to that problem has been soaring up the iTunes charts in the form of a ten-minute silent song called “A a a a a Very Good Song” [Direct Link].
Created by Samir Mezrahi, the song allows users a full nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds to find the song they actually want to hear after connecting their iPhone to their car through USB. Mezrahi is charging $0.99 for each download of the music-less track, although Apple Music subscribers can simply add the song into their library for free.
It’s not just in the car. My iPhone often gets confused when I try to resume audio playback, and instead of remembering which podcast I was listening to it picks a song to play (using a different app).
Update (2017-08-12): See also: David Pierce (via JR Raphael).
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
I once recorded a down-tempo 5 minute song (on iPad with my iRig HD!) that I found I could listen to on a loop as background noise. I'm no musician, but it was quite inoffensive to me -- far less offensive than the first song that started with A in my iTunes library at least. So anyway, about three years ago, I renamed it to "AaAaAHHH What?" and copied it to iTunes for the very same reason as this chap here created this song with lots of A's at the start of the title.
https://soundcloud.com/adrian-oconnor/aaaaaahhh-what
That gives me five minutes to find something to listen to before the highly annoying previously-first song comes on :)
Why people have to buy it? Once I discovered that music is playing songs in alphabetical order I just created few blank audio files and named them like aaaaa1 and later I just made a mix of my favorite tunes and used instead.
This is such a clear UX fail on the Music and iTunes part, all it takes an option in prefferences.
