creative software
The Shuffle Alarm app is an experiment to explore new ways to improve personal well-being. Can the mind can be brought into consciousness, at the beginning of the day, in a way that is more conducive to having a good, positive, or productive day?
The app didn’t originally support subdirectories of song files, it only read song files directly placed in the app directory. With a recent update, Shuffle Alarm now supports subdirectories of song files. This makes it easy to just copy a whole album into the Shuffle Alarm directory, or folders of artists, each with folders of albums.
This update brings a significant impovement to the user experience, because shuffling through a set of folders of albums produces a better result than shuffling through a single directory of individually selected songs.
I ran tests to confirm that the app works with thousands of songs, while maintaining a non-redundant shuffle, and it does.
I learned that it’s better to be less selective about what songs to put in the app. For a while I was individually selecting them, like if I heard a song I thought would be good to wake up to. Those songs are too pleasant, though. It functions as relaxing background music that you can sleep to, if it’s a well-chosen song that you think would be good to wake up to. It’s better to just put a bunch of folders in there with stuff that you think is good but maybe aren’t very familiar with. Something that will catch your interest and draw out your attention.