Genius in iTunes 8 gets mixed reviews

Jordan Golson — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:44:40 -0700

The feature that's drawing the most attention in iTunes 8 is Genius, which helps users organize their collections and find related songs. Reactions are mixed, judging by some of the online reactions:

The recommendation engine seems pretty damn smart. The Genius playlists are a clever idea, like the shuffle feature but with a hint. After a few hours, I like the results better than either my own manual playlists or purely random shuffles...

The new visualizer is stunning. The old one remains available (View → Visualizer → iTunes Classic Visualizer) but it’s hard to see how anyone wouldn’t prefer the new one.

-- John Gruber, Notes and Observations Regarding Yesterday’s ‘Let’s Rock’ Apple Special Event, Daring Fireball

Shh. Don't tell anyone. My iTunes Genius is tone deaf. When I selected "Man of Constant Sorrow" as my "seed" song, My Genius actually suggested "America, F**k [sic] Yeah" and "Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky)" at the store. The proper genre, or at least the genre I was looking for, was "Rockin' Bluegrass", not "Obscure Movie Themes". Bzzt...

I expect the Genius feature will only improve, especially as Apple big brothers all our personal music collections but for now I'm so totally not dropping Last.fm any time soon.

-- Erica Sadun, My iTunes Genius is a Moron, TUAW

As for the Genius iTunes purchase recommendations…well, so far almost all of them have been either been really obvious (other songs by the artist in question), oddball (ones that seem to be based at least in part on name similarity, such as recommending Louis Farrar for Louis Prima and the Rustles for the Rutles), or nonexistent (Genius said it had no recommendations based on the Beatles, which makes me wonder if it only works if the song you use as the basis is available in the iTunes Store). I can’t imagine that the results are always so spotty, and am therefore curious to hear what other folks think about it.

-- Harry McCracken, iTunes 8 First Impressions: Pretty, Good, Technologizer

I think the more mainstream and well known the music you use to source the playlists, the better. Until more people use it and Apple gets more data for more obscure acts, you're going to get random results. This is because it uses metadata from the songs; it doesn't actually analyze what's going on musically. This is why the recommendations made by Pandora are so awesome. In time, Genius playlists should get more useful, but I think I'll still stick to Pandora when I want to mix things up.

-- Adam Frucci, iTunes 8 Available for Download Now, We Test It Out, Gizmodo

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Genius in iTunes 8 gets mixed reviews