Silence

There’s a pretty good easy-listening guitar-based album from Dominic Miller called Shapes. He’s been working with Sting for a long time, and one of the tracks on the album is an extremely good re-recording of Sting’s Shape of my Heart song. All well and good as a recommendation, but what’s this got to do with anything? Bear with me…

Three or four years ago, I bought a third-party add-on for the stereo in my car to allow it to play music from my iPhone. It’s not just a audio link, but using it you can pause and skip tracks. In essence, the add-on fools the stereo into thinking that the iPhone is a CD. Personally, I use it most of all for Pandora to use it as a radio station lookalike, but without the ads. Playing music I like.

All well and good,  but when I plug the phone in and start the car, the stereo immediately starts playing the last “CD” it knew about, which is of course, the add-on/iPhone fakery. The problem for me is the iPhone defaults to the Music app, not Pandora. It also so happens that the Music app starts playing – ready for this? – the first track in alphabetical order of all the tracks on my phone. I have to change the app playing music to Pandora again.

So what does this have to do with Dominic Miller’s Shapes album? Well, I bought it through iTunes. It’s in the Music app, along with a few playlists. The first alphabetical track on my phone is the second track on that album: Adagio in G minor, by Albinoni, as interpreted on the guitar. Let me tell you I am now thoroughly and heartily sick of this friggin’ tune. I’ve tried removing it from the iPhone; because it’s an iTunes purchase, it creeps back in. The intro to this track is now enough to make me scream, and I do.

It got to the point where I went online to try and find an answer. Let me put it like this: there’s a whole bunch of people out there who have the same problem. I am vindicated in my anger; I am not alone. All without a real solution, until I came across a hint on Reddit: record or (better) download a track that is just silence, rename it to AAAAAAAAA to make sure it appears first in the Music app’s alphabetical list and then worry no more. You’ll have plenty of time (and silence) to unlock the phone, switch apps to Pandora (or whatever you listen to) and get on with your drive and your life.

Yep, a first-world problem, but the solution is absolutely magic.

  Loading links to posts on similar topics...