Shuffle music playback on the iphone 4S

On the beach vacation last week, had an interesting experience with the rental car. We were looking for the cigarette lighter socket in order to plug in the GPS gizmo; it was pretty well hidden under the centerline cup-holder. Also in there was a USB socket...hoping it would be connected to the radio, I plugged in my phone--yea verily yea! It did *exactly* the thing I wanted it to do, without my even knowing what that was at first, which was go straight to music and start playback.

Playback of the current playlist, which was *not* what I wanted, because it was not a playlist at all but rather a single special selection. So I had to figure out what to do to get it onto a different playlist. Unfortunately, this necessitates unplugging the phone from the car each time you want to actually use the music app's own controls. And I wanted it to do "shuffle". Which meant finding out how to get it to shuffle in the first place.

The deal is this: "shuffle" is not a global setting like on my ipod. Shuffle works on a per-playlist basis. An album = one playlist. The songs for an artist = one playlist. All the songs you have =- one playlist. Etc. So to get global shuffle, go to "music->songs->shuffle" where the "shuffle" button is at the very top of the list of songs, above "A"--you'll see these two intertwined arrows, press that and make it turn blue (as opposed to gray, which means off). Plug the phone back in, and that playlist (all songs) now plays in random mode.

The other thing about shuffle is that when you turn it on, it computes a complete ordered list of the playlist (all songs) in advance. So if you cycle through it once, things play again in the same order. If you want a new order, press the shuffle arrows again to turn it off, and again to turn it back on, which produces a completely new ordering.

You can't do shuffle for albums (or artists), like the ipod does, which kinda bites--I really want to shuffle albums. I'm really not interested in listening to a song in the middle of an album like Tommy, or JC Superstar. But it does not seem possible to cause that.

The other thing that happened was when I flipped over to make a call, the radio went silent so I could talk, and when I was done with the call the music came back (no I wasn't driving).

I want this behavior in my own car, now. That was great. And it means replacing the radio--which I was going to do anyway, it's an Alpine unit, which is nice, but has been having misbehaviors recently.

Best Buy has a nice Sony on sale right now. Going to check this all out tomorrow after work.

[later--ok, this doesn't work as well as I thought. why?]