DJ a Party with iTunes

With your music, the iTunes Music Store, Internet radio stations, and a good pair of speakers attached to your computer or iPod, you can easily share your music with a small group of dinner guests or a large group of friends.

The Party Shuffle feature lets you create a dynamic playlist from your entire music library, or any playlist. You can review upcoming songs, reorder or delete on the fly, and take charge like the DJ you’ve always wanted to be. And at any time, you or a guest can add, remove, or reorder songs in the mix.

Tips

Quickly add songs to the beginning of a party shuffle

When you drag a song from another playlist to the Party Shuffle playlist, it will normally be added to the bottom of the list. If you want to queue a song from another playlist to be the next song played in Party Shuffle, hold the Control key and click the song you want to add. From the menu that appears, choose Play Next in Party Shuffle.

Opening Party Shuffle in its own window

If you want to open the Party Shuffle playlist in a separate window to limit access to what songs are added, or to make it easier to add songs from other playlists, simply double-click the Party Shuffle item in the Source list.

Changing the source playlist

By default the Party Shuffle playlist takes songs from your music library. If you have a combination of music and audio-books in your library you might not want an audio-book to start playing in the middle of a party. You can easily have the Party Shuffle playlist pull songs from any playlist you want by by choosing a playlist from the Source menu at the bottom of the Party Shuffle list.

Removing Party Shuffle from the Source list

If you find that you don’t use the Party Shuffle playlist, and want to remove that item from the Source list, go to the iTunes menu and choose Preferences. In iTunes preferences you can deselect the Party Shuffle item, and it will be removed from the source list when you click OK.

Other display options

In addition to choosing which source list songs are pulled from, you can also display the number of recently played and upcoming songs. This can be useful to make sure the same song doesn’t get played twice within a certain amount of time. Even when limiting the number of upcoming songs you can always add songs from other playlists and they’ll be added to the list.

Steps

Use the Party Shuffle playlist

Select the Party Shuffle playlist in the Source list.
Select a playlist or your music library from the Source pop-up menu.
From the Display pop-up menus, choose the number of recently played songs and upcoming songs you want to display in the list of songs.
If you want to change the order of a song in the playlist, simply drag it to where you want it.
Highlight a song you don’t want played and then press the Delete key. Notice that the song is removed from the playlist and a new song is added to the bottom of the list.