Author Topic: Itunes 8 and genius (Read 548 times)

neXus · **on:** September 20, 2008, 23:12:59 PM

Itunes 8 and genius

on: September 20, 2008, 23:12:59 PM

I know not many here are fans of itunes but since I had an ipod and macbook pro I use it and do not have a problem with it. Itunes 8 has no huge visual changes bar a new visual thing and a new song view display but its smaller in size and a bit speedier and now supports hd content via the itunes store.

The main new feature is Genius, this basically creates playlists for you but is actually very clever.

IF you have it on the first thing that will happen is all your song information and playlist information is uploaded into a cloud server over at apple (all private, nothing more then the get info aspect of from the library file for songs and the playlist files.
It does it for everyone who has this turned on. With that it then sends some information back to your itunes and to your iphone or ipod when your done and your set.

What happens is that when you are playing a song and press the genius button it creates a playlist based on 25... or what ever songs you set. The resulting playlist is of all similar types of songs to what you selected, not just as simple as genre and album but any similar sort of style of song and even early in it is quite accurate and so far I have been impressed with the playlists it has made.
You do not need to be online for it to now create these playlists but you can choose to show the sidebar for genius in itunes to see online songs you could buy that match also.
The other good aspect though is this passes to your mobile device so on my ipod I can just play a song, like it press the button and I have a playlist of similar music and in terms of being out and about, running or what ever this quick and easy playlist saves time having to make one before you go out or trying to flick through songs to find stuff you want to play.

How it works roughly that the cloud server collects song information and has some match criteria that way but the bulk of the working out is done through everyones playlists they have, looking at a song and seeing what other common songs are in the same playlists and formulates the matches as a result. Apple have said as the longer it runs the better the results will get. The sync takes a few minutes but as mentioned to create a genius playlist there after you do not need to be online. What happens is the genius calculations based on your library of music are sent back to you in a small file (must be to fit on ipods etc) and so itunes and the devices can make the genius information based on the file(s)

I know other players probably do this or someone here will say others probably done similar for ages but this is very accurate and helping me play songs I not played for ages and actually like.

Quixoticish · **Reply #1 on:** September 21, 2008, 11:12:30 AM

Re:Itunes 8 and genius

Reply #1 on: September 21, 2008, 11:12:30 AM

Ive had to make the switch to Itunes after buying an Ipod and everything else refusing to sync with it properly (or revealing that none of my files were tagged properly), and once you spend the time to shut down all of the random services that pop up here there its quite good. My only major gripe about it is the media library is pathetic to navigate, this is one area where Winamp (and Foobar once you customise it) cant be beaten. The different windows enabling you to nicely hop between artist, album and tracks on the album with a single click are fantastic, I find the Itunes "one window" approach really slows down my scanning around for new songs to queue up. I also hate how it will not install or play without Quicktime.

Incidentally this Genius thing seems to be crap, all it does is suggest more songs by the same artist for me, and on the rare occasions it does work it makes bollocks suggestions (Dio, Dimmu Borgir, Joan Jett, Mayhem and Pink Floyd on the same playlist?) The Winamp musicmatch service (if thats what it was called, my memory is a little hazy) always worked fine 99% of the time and returned a list of 15 or so songs that genuinely did work well together on a playlist. Ive just tried the Itunes verison again and have gotten Anathema and Cyndi Lauper on a playlist. Epic fail to be honest.

I think thats my main problem with Itunes. Its great for syncing if you have an Ipod but thats about it, everything else it does has been done better elsewhere, in some cases many years ago. They need to stop reinventing the wheel and, to be quite frank, rip off some of the more innovate features from other players.

Incidentally is there any way to stop the music library hopping back to the next song to play when the track changes? For instance if I double click a song to play, then start browsing the media library when the track changes it skips the window back to the currently playing track. Its driving me fecking insane as it seems totally pointless, there has to be a way to disable it and then a keyboard shortcut to skip back to the currently playing track when required or something.

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