What is your favorite way to listen to music?

[Prettymaid]

Do you like listening to music in the form of albums and playlists, the shuffle feature on your audio device, or the randomness of radio?

Sorry for the typo in #3!

[Freypower]

I shuffle the iPod except when I'm in the car, when I play CDs in the proper order. Sometimes I do playlists on the iPod, about once a month. Every November I play every Glenn track I have on the iPod, shuffled, for his birthday.

[TimothyBFan]

I need an All Of The Above choice. It depends on my mood. I do a lot of playlist on my iPod but I listen to Sirius satellite more than anything lately so I chose the radio choice.

[Prettymaid]

Yeah, that's why I put the word favorite in there. I know how you Borderers are, always wanting to pick more than one answer!

[lizzyplays]

LOL

Good poll question, PM!

[Brooke]

I like the shuffle feature on the ipod of the artist I've chosen most of the time.

[Henley Honey]

It depends on if I'm home alone. If so, I blast the Bose playing CD's that are not on my ipod. If hubby is home, it's ipod and earbuds -- usually on shuffle -- just to mix it up.

[bluefox4000]

I usually have in my head in advance the albums i want to hear that day. And i'll make my own playlists.

Mick

[Jonny Come Lately]

I'm very much an albums guy - I like to listen to albums from front to back. That doesn't mean I don't listen to songs separately but if I never play an album in full there's usually a good reason why not.

There are also albums which I think are quite simply best listened to in order as they are tied together by a concept or a common theme. Pink Floyd's concept albums (The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall) are the most obvious examples in my collection, and it's the same with Desperado. There are also albums which are worth listening to in order simply because every track is great (I consider HC to be in this category, alongside albums like Led Zeppelin IV, Wishbone Ash's Argus and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours) or because the whole is better than the sum of its parts (Neil Young's After The Gold Rush stands out to me in this regard).

There are one or two albums where sometimes I deviate from the usual front to back, take Pink Floyd's Meddle for instance where sometimes I start with the epic 23-minute long Echoes (which took up the whole of side 2 on the original LP) before then going on to listen to side 1, while I've also listened to the electric side 2 of Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Rust Never Sleeps before playing the acoustic side 2.

Having said all that, I have recently created a few iPod playlists which have a 'pool' of songs which are then played at random, usually in the car.
- Acoustic & Ballads - Mainly a softer, quieter collection of songs, probably more acoustic folk or country songs than ballads in truth.
- Rock, Rhythm & Blues - A collection of harder rockers or blues-inspired songs. My Dad loves this playlist but my Mum isn't such a fan (I deliberately put most of the songs she doesn't really like but I wanted to include on one playlist so I could play the others around her).
- Other Favourites - Pretty much anything else goes here, the only real criteria being that it's not too off the wall or too long. I think of it as the middle playlist of the three.

All in all the playlists have been fun to listen to, I sometimes like the songs to be random although I dislike total randomness - I've never been much of a radio listener, sometimes songs I like do come up but quite often they get cut which usually annoys me. The lack of classic rock stations in the UK does not help either.

The Eagles feature prominently on all the playlists as they have such a wide range of material, the same isn't true of other acts - for example most of the Led Zeppelin songs I've included are on the rock playlist whereas my Fleetwood Mac songs are mainly on the other two with just a few on the rock one. All of the Neil Young songs on the acoustic/ballads playlist are solo and the ones on the rock playlist are with Crazy Horse, with the middle featuring songs by both.