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Culture» Software

No Genius for you

During todays morning coffee, after reading a number of articles discussing the new Genius feature in iTunes 8 I thought I might give it a try. I was hoping that this might prove to be another interesting way to sort through my growing collection of music and eliminate the need for last.fm. Unfortunately, as I discovered, this feature's primary purpose is to drive more sales to the iTunes store and not act as some kind of intelligent sorting tool. When trying out Genius, iTunes plainly told me that this feature wasn't available in my location. If you don't live where the iTunes store can sell you music then you can't use it.

This after an inordinately long process, which I had to repeat twice, to reregister my iTunes store account. An account I have only because I subscribed to .Mac years ago. Accessing the store seemed incredibly slow as well.

I did see that the apps. store is available in my area but otherwise boo on you Apple. I guess I'll have to stick to Last.fm.

Here is thorough look at the Genius service from the Listening Post:

For now, the Genius sidebar is essentially a slicker version of what we've had for years within iTunes and other programs. But we have to hand it to Apple for at least having made the recommendations more powerful and easier to access.
Once you opt in to the service, which sends your music library and usage data to Apple anonymously according to the company, iTunes can generate a list of music in your library that sounds similar to any song in it, from which you can make a playlist. The Genius sidebar (screenshots below) performs essentially the same function, except that it draws recommendations from the iTunes music store. Those recommendations include similar songs, top albums by the artist, songs by the artist missing from your collection and iTunes Essentials collections that include the song.

ITunes Crashes Music Recommendation Party

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