Cars are still trying to figure out what to do with technology. Bluetooth interfaces are pretty dorky and the meshing of things via USB etc is dicey.
In my FIAT I abandoned the whole Blue and Me bluetooth mishmosh (a wonderful microsoft invention) and use Siri to start music playing etc. My car has a USB port which is great because it charges and it allows playing through the car’s speakers. If I start playing an album or playlist and then plug it into the USB cable, it usually keeps playing that music. If I just plug it in though, it starts playing from the list of songs, at some random place.
Usually this is annoying and I will tell Siri: “Siri, play Paul Simon playlist, shuffled.” or something similar. And she does.
Today I was driving home in this veritable white out and was really thinking more about keeping my phone charged in case of power outage so I plugged in the cable.
Up came Enya, A Day Without Rain. All right. Let it ride. Then:
- Dazzling Blue, Paul Simon
- De Trilport/a Fublaines, Pierre Bensusan
- De War En Lorda Awten, Burturav
- Dead March from Saul, Alfred Eschwé
- The Defiler, The Hobbit
- Den Toppede Hone, Burturav
- Desperado, The Eagles
- Devil’s Hornpipe, John Hartford*
- Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, Paul Simon
- Dick’s Maggot, Bare Necessities
- Different Kind of Wonderful, Fisher
- Dimming of the Day, Bonnie Raitt
- The Dispute at the Crossroads, Altan
- (Do You Wanna To Date) My Avatar?, The Guild
- Dog And Gun, John Roberts and Tony Barrand
* This was there twice and I just let it ride. I love John Hartford and how he talks through parts of traditional fiddle tunes.
Why am I blathering about all this? Because sometimes it all works out and it makes me wonder about how it decides where to start playing. It shouldn’t make a difference if it’s shuffled or played straight but at least in the D’s there was a nice run of things that were quite ok. The only blipped-over track was a spoken word piece. One blip.
(And the FIAT let me blip over it right from the steering wheel, left hand controls.)
