[saalweachter]

I mean, CDs replaced vinyl and cassettes for a lot of reasons, and the shuffle probably wasn't number one on anyone's list.

But still, I would be shocked if I listened to any CD straight through more than once, immediately after buying it. Once straight through to hear all the tracks, and then every time after that it'd be skipping around through my favorites or shuffling on repeat until I got tired of it and switched CDs.

And then once CD burners reached my price point, it was almost nothing but mix CDs, the original albums left on a rack in case I needed to re-rip them.

[saltcured]

I did record a lot of my vinyl and CDs to cassette tape for portable and car use. I remember many public transit rides with my walkman and a zipper case of 10 tapes or so. I made some mix tapes but mostly just ran albums straight through on 90 minute metal tapes, repeating or cutting a track as needed to fill the 45 minute side and make auto-reverse pleasant without any winding.

But, ignoring mix tapes, I didn't really get into track-level shuffling until the MP3 era where I could shuffle a much bigger pile of tracks. I do remember that a Sony 5-disc carousel could shuffle tracks reasonably quickly. But when I used players with a 6 or 10 disc cassette, track shuffle would mean spending a lot of time listening to servo motors and occasionally disturbing clunks that evoked visions of shattered or gouged discs.

I never had one of those massive jukebox style carousels that was sort of a hybrid of the two and could quickly switch among scores or hundreds of discs. By the time I saw those as affordable, they already seemed obsolete. Instead, I was ripping my CDs to MP3 (eventually repeated to FLAC), and had a USB to S/PDIF soundcard to send audio back to my A/V receiver over optical fiber.

[throw0101c]

> But still, I would be shocked if I listened to any CD straight through more than once, immediately after buying it. Once straight through to hear all the tracks, and then every time after that it'd be skipping around through my favorites or shuffling on repeat until I got tired of it and switched CDs.

I think that a reasonable number of people had audio gear (boomboxes) that could play a CD and record it to tape at the same time (and also record the radio to tape).

I think that for a number of years a lot of folks used mix tapes to listen to their favourite tracks from a CD (or a number of CDs).