Latest update on iTunes
Genius? Anybody know who he/she is?
So with the latest update on iTunes (version 8.0) you get yourself a new feature called Genius.
You can choose a song from your library and it creates a playlist for you – with tracks in the style of the one you sent to Genius.
It’s clearly a marketing tool, designed to tell you what you should be buying from iTunes, so I was slightly sceptical at first.
However, it’s quite a nice feature. And it works! Example – I picked ‘The Painter’ by Neil Young and it gave me great little playlist of Beth Orton, Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, David Gray – basically singer/songwriters.
If, like me, you’ve got loads of tracks in your iTunes, this is actually a very handy feature.
Warning – It took about 20 mins to transfer 12,000 tracks to the Genius database.
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80!
there's bloody 80 meg of it! I'll do it later - the internet is on go slow at the moment.
The Filter
Sounds very similar to The Filter. A piece of software that Peter Gabriel has been promoting for a few years. Hopefully Genius is better though as Filter had a habit of always selecting from the same small pool of tracks whilst (annoyingly) renaming the first track you select. An over-promoted, under-developed piece of sh!te.
Yeah, I recall the Gabriel
Yeah, I recall the Gabriel software. I suppose Lastfm does something similar as well.
It does throw in a few strange selections, it has to be said...
Genius?
Well, that may be going a little far, but it's pretty good at first examination. Great for throwing together a quick playlist as you go out for a walk/jog/run/whatever. I also like the grid display feature.
Genuis
My favourite thing about the Genius feature as opposed to Last.FM or The Filter is that you can use it from iPod without having to be online. Being able to classify tracks as audiobooks without having to re-rip them as AAC files and rename them is good too.
The only bad thing about the grid display is that I'm now going to have to obsessively hunt down all my album artwork.
After 24 hours use...
...I'm quite impressed because it seems to leave out anything it doesn't recognise. That means that if I'm playing in Genius mode it leaves out old scraps of podcast recordings and other non-music things that are always cluttering up my iTunes.