I've been using MPD (+ mpc, ncmpcpp, ario) for a long time now (several years). There is one thing that I miss from my iTunes usage: the party mix. It was an awesome tool (at least back in iTunes v4 to v6) and I was really always in there.

Basically what I want is to be able to tell my player "randomly select songs in this playlist/folder/…" and then that it shows me at some place the last 5 or 10 songs played and the next 20 to play, and let me remove songs I don't wanna listen to right now from this "songs-to-play" list, and then refill the list up to 20 songs. This way I can repeat the operation a few times and know that I have at least an hour of aweome music to come.

I know I could script that up for MPD, even with just MPC and Bash (and Zenity for the cozyness), but I'm a lazy guy and I can almost reproduce the behavior with the shuffle command of MPD. You know, the worst ennemy of "great" is "good enough".