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Several times, I am too indecisive to choose exactly what music I want to listen to on my iPhone, and so the shuffle feature is something I rely on quite a bit. Shuffle songs, a music application from developer Chilli X, aims to upgrade the built in music player’s boring shuffle feature with a little eye candy.

Visually, Random Play is brilliant. The application makes the cover of 12 songs in your iTunes library and displays them on screen, letting you see a random mix of songs that you can tap around to like a game of musical popcorn.

This’s a great step shuffle generic, often leading to repeated jumps until I find something I can bear. With Random Play’s approach, you see a preview of a possible dozen songs and choose what is most attractive. If you see something you know you don’t want to hear, you can double-tap and a new one will appear. If nothing looks appealing, shake the iPod and a whole new set of covers will appear.

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to Random Play. The App Store description says that Random Play will only select songs with associated art, but I found that a graphic resembling a record sometimes showed up for songs with no pictures. Some users might enjoy this “mystery track” feature; to me, it kind of defeats the purpose of the visual shuffle. If you have obtained your music from a source other than the App Store, legal or otherwise, and have not had the patience to add a picture to every last track, a lot of your iTunes library won’t work properly in Random Play.

Because third party applications can not run in the background on an iPhone or iPod Touch, Random Play shuts off if you exit the application to check your e-mail or read the calendar. Contrast that with the iPod app, which can run in the background and keep cranking out music.

If you like the idea of a visual shuffle, and you can remember to keep the app open when it’s in use, Random Play is pretty neat. But if you are multitasking more than one who prefers to play music in the background, the built-in iPod shuffle and its application films are probably more to your liking.

Railing against the 99 cent MP3 after years, Apple caved in last year and allowed labels to price songs as high as $1.29 each.

And now everyone is paying the price: Music sales growth is slowing dramatically, following years of breakneck growth.

Warner Music has blown the whistle on the subject, saying that digital music sales growth for its latest quarter was only eight per cent. A year ago, was 20 percent.

The numbers track with the rest of the industry: December growth of digital music sales across the board was just 5 percent vs. December 2008.

What food for thought for those who disagree with a study announced last week, said the price cut could boost sales of digital music and maximize revenue. Suddenly, some points of real world data to a real problem on the horizon, unless prices start to deflate.

One of the challenges lies in the expectations and how he has created resistance to higher prices. The price of music had been established at 99 cents a share before Apple will support up to 30 %. Many consumers have clearly balked at the move, having become stubbornly accustomed to paying a buck a track.

The AllThingsD blog linked above warns that publishers may have the same type of reaction to eBooks prices begin to rise. Now that Amazon has set the bar at $9.99 per book, publishers may lose large amounts of sales of new shares at a price of $ 12.99 or $ 14.99: Consumers have already had expectations set at under 10 bucks, and they do not like the rules of the game being changed on them.

There is a lesson for companies with greater flexibility in the price: If you do not know the price levels , set them high to begin with and lower them as you go. That way you end up with happily surprised consumers who feel like they’re getting a windfall discount instead of angry because prices are rising for no reason at all.