“I’ve finally downloaded the iTunes 8 update, and played around a bit with the Genius song recommendation feature. After a test drive, I’ve decided it’s the best thing Apple has added to its music management suite in quite a while,” Jon Fortt reports for Fortune.
“Genius solves my ‘iTunes laziness’ problem. I’ve got 4,000 items in my library, I listen to genres as diverse as gospel, alternative and hip-hop, to and I’m too lazy to make good playlists out of it all. I used to count on the Party Shuffle feature to save me, but got tired of how it would end up throwing in random Christmas carols at the wrong times of year,” Fortt explains.
“A couple of reasons Genius is a good move for Apple, business-wise: One, it encourages people with decent-sized iTunes libraries to listen more… Two, it increases the ‘stickiness’ of iTunes,” Fortt writes.
“Apple is making great use of the computing power in its data centers to unobtrusively provide a feature that any music lover will understand,” Fortt writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: iTunes “Genius” feature gets “smarter” the more people use it, so expect the random weird song choice(s) you might see now to evaporate over time.
wow, i never realized i owned a music management suite !
i’m SO proud !
only reccommend songs available in iTMS? Or does it make reccommendations based on the info in the cloud?
Write the following in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE
it gets rid of the arrows and the genre list.
“So, maybe I’ve got a retarded genius in my iTunes. “
Then at least genius is modeled on a real Apple Store Genius.
Looks like the Genius feature uses the cloud to lay the groundwork for a new www search feature to compete with Google.
Genius couldn’t come up with a similarity for the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” I have no use for such a “feature.”
It’s a decent feature, but I noticed that the majority of “Genius” is to create a music community in which we identify our tastes into music. Interesting.
Hal: “Would you like to hear a song, Dave?”
I’m still waiting for the tin-foil hat wearing crowds to come out on this one.
@Tower Tone,
As a Cincinnati native, I can appreciate that comment.
@MizuInOz
Nes pas is a faux pas.
The correct spelling is n’est-ce pas.
Genius actually found matches for some of my French pop songs!
This is what “the cloud” is all about.