Last week, during Apple’s “Big Media Event”, iTunes 8 was announced. Normally, I don’t upgrade my iTunes because I haven’t bought the new gadgets (i.e., iPhone, iPod Touch), so point upgrades were not useful to me. But this was an entire version upgrade, like XP->Vista, or DS Phat -> DSL, and if I upgraded, I could play with the new features.

Like the media event, I was underwhelmed. There’s a new visualizer which I haven’t even tried out yet. There’s an album cover/genre view which I don’t use, and there’s this new feature called Genius. Genius is supposed to pick through your music collection, send it to Apple (Hi Pirates!), and then suggest songs that go perfect with each other. With Genius, you’d never have to create your own playlist or mixtape ever again!!11!!111!one

Right.

The first time I tried Genius, I selected a song and brought up the new Genius sidebar. I was not impressed when I saw that the sidebar had links to the iTunes Store where I could buy songs and albums that would sound perfect with my selected song. Cashgrab? Well to be honest that was the Genius sidebar and not Genius itself. Next I started Genius properly and pulled up my perfect playlist. From what I can tell, Genius works on the following algorithm:

1. Add songs that other people who listen to this song, listen to
2. Add songs in the same genre
3. Add songs in the same time period

Ta-da! Well magic’s not always perfect. To illustrate how this method is completely flawed, I picked a couple of lonely orphans in my music collection. What are some songs that go perfect with Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive:

I’d expect some disco, I guess Pet Shop Boys and Cher are close (although that’s 90s Cher). But Robbie Williams? Queen??

Ok, how about Biz Markie’s Just a Friend?

This looks like my collection of hip-hop songs, random stuff from the 80s to the 00s; with some R&B thrown in for fun.

And finally, Kardinal Offishal’s Dangerous:

I don’t have much recent music in my library right now, and so Genius decided to pull half the songs from my last list that was “perfect” for early 90s rap. And some Britney Spears. Genius needs to go back to school.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: apple, itunes