How do I turn off shuffle in iOS4?

September 15, 2010 7:36 AM

How do you turn off shuffle in iOS4? Since upgrading to the new OS, it is always in shuffle mode and I can't make it play albums in track order.

I have turned off "Shake to Shuffle" in settings. Based on the Apple forums, I am obviously not the only one having this problem, but nobody actually explains how to fix it. I need an actual answer by someone who knows how to explain things, so I'm asking AskMeFi instead of the Apple forums. Don't assume I'm dumb, but assume whatever change they have made is obtuse to me for whatever reason.

posted by hydropsyche to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I have an iPhone 4 running the latest OS. To turn off shuffle, on the now playing screen (that shows the album cover) I touch the intertwined arrow icon on the right side beneath the progress bar. I do notice the the shuffle icon at the top of the song list in song list view does not toggle shuffle, but just reshuffles the tracks.
posted by studentbaker at 8:08 AM on September 15, 2010

Tap the top part of the screen when playing music to bring up an overlay window with ipod controls. Look at the bottom right corner of the overlay window; is the shuffle icon blue? Maybe you accidentally switched it on. If so, tap and turn it off.
posted by hariya at 8:11 AM on September 15, 2010

Best answer: studentbaker has it, but if it's helpful in future, I find the User Guide more useful than the forums for these "I think this should be obvious, but I don't see it" things. Scroll down to find the iOS4 one, should be in the bookmarks in the iPhone Safari too.
posted by harriet vane at 8:18 AM on September 15, 2010

Response by poster: harriet vane's link to the manual did it for me. The sentence that finally helped me was "To display additional controls, tap the album artwork on the Now Playing screen. "

Tapping the album artwork brings up the 'repeat', 'genius', and 'shuffle' icons that used to be always displayed on the screen in previous versions.

I have no idea why they made such a counter-intuitive change in the music player--so I could see the pretty artwork?
posted by hydropsyche at 8:49 AM on September 15, 2010

Response by poster: Forgot to say: Thank you to everybody for trying to explain. Like I said, for whatever reason this was totally obtuse for me and it took reading exactly the right wording to finally figure out what to do. And now those controls appear to be permanently on the album art screen--it just required me to think to tap that screen once at some point.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:43 AM on September 15, 2010

Note that they aren't permanently on the screen: it acts as a toggle, so if you single tap the album artwork area again, the controls will disappear.
posted by Diggins at 9:59 AM on September 15, 2010

I'm running iOS 3.1 on my iPhone 3G, and the behavior you describe as new matches how my phone has always worked.

I have no idea why they made such a counter-intuitive change in the music player

I think the only change here is that the upgrade reset the default view to the one without the extra controls. My upgrade from 3.1.2 to 3.1.3 did the same thing, IIRC.

it just required me to think to tap that screen once at some point.

I imagine you did that at some point in the past under iOS 3.x, which turned on the extra controls, and then managed to never tap the area below those controls to see them disappear and reappear.

That's not intended as criticism or snark. I toggle those controls on and off all the time trying to scroll lyrics or even turn shuffle on or off. If you've never seen the toggling behavior, you are far more precise than I could ever hope to be with your taps.
posted by chazlarson at 10:03 AM on September 15, 2010

Response by poster: Okay, now y'all just have me laughing at myself for being preposterous and never having this problem before.

If you've never seen the toggling behavior, you are far more precise than I could ever hope to be with your taps.

I actually totally suck at tapping and so I'm always incredibly careful with every tap. I also think that I don't usually listen to music with that screen up, in fact when I'm listening to my iPod Touch I'm usually either using another application on it or I have the screen turned off while I do something else entirely, so I just haven't had that many opportunities to accidentally tap in the wrong place. Except one day I apparently did and then I was stuck in shuffle mode and the world came to an end.

Thanks again, everybody, for advice and being understanding of my obtuseness!
posted by hydropsyche at 1:50 PM on September 15, 2010