I apologize for this being so long, I wanted to cover issues that people may bring up as well as list out ways this may be beneficial for some.
I had a request a while ago for completely removing Shuffle from the default Music app, but tonight I think I stumbled on a better idea.
I think a "Exclude from Shuffle" option would be better.
I thought of two examples where this would work perfectly:
A couple that shares an iTunes/iCloud account, may have the same songs in the account that is synced to their iPhone, iPad, whatever. You may be into metal and all things rock 'n roll, but your SO is more into pop. Wouldn't it be great if there was a tweak that could allow you to exclude all of their pop songs, that are in the iCloud, so that you can play shuffle perfectly and not have to skip so much? Same thing for them and their iDevice.
Another place it would useful is for children or older adults like your parents, grandparents, or other older family members. You may enjoy listening to all of your Explicit music, but they may have issues with it or you may not always feel comfortable listening to explicit music in front of them. With this tweak, you could exclude all of that music and play shuffle, never having to worry whether the next song will contain profanity or not.
Conversely, this could also be a "Include only in Shuffle" tweak. Instead of excluding songs, you could select which ones you want to include and the rest would be excluded.
Perhaps this could be done through a checkbox sort of thing where you go through your music library and check off which songs you want excluded/included (it would be best to have the exclude option for those with bigger libraries and include for those with smaller libraries).
Two issues I can see people bringing up are:
The reason some may not have this option is the iCloud. For me, all of my music is stored on Apple's servers. Mostly being that I have over 6,000 songs uploaded there and sort of share the account with someone. I often find myself skipping 4-5 times during Shuffle because there are lots of songs that I just don't care for. I can't exclude some of those songs from the iCloud because I and another person are sharing them so it would be nice to have this option.
With a lot of libraries, like mine, they may include 6,000+ songs and there's no way I am going to go through and pick and choose which songs I want to include in a playlist because a majority of them are ones that I do want. I would rather go through and pick out which songs I don't want played in Shuffle because that is a much smaller list of the two.
Also, I often get into my car and it automatically loads Shuffle. Often times when it boots Shuffle, it's 4-5 songs that I don't care for and would rather have excluded from the Shuffle mix. If I could have a "Exclude from Shuffle" tweak, I might not be touching my radio for the first few minutes of driving, trying to find a song that I like.
But, perhaps, this is an issue many of you aren't experiencing and don't care about. For those of us who do, what do you think?