A closer look at iTunes 8.0: Genius

Of all the recent additions to iTunes made with it’s recent 8.0 upgrade, the biggest has to be Genius.

Genius evaluates your music collection track by track, sends the information to Apple and comes back with a generated playlist based on your own music collection. Theoretically, playing something from an early Peter Gabriel album and clicking on Genius would bring you a playlist chock full of Genesis and Marillion. If you don’t have any similar music in your collection, Genius will recommend some that’s available for purchase on the iTunes Store.

Setting up Genius for the first time is easy, though by no means an instant process. Because they’d like to upsell you on new tracks when possible, use of Genius requires an iTunes Store account. Their upselling feature actually works quite well — whenever you play a track a list of similar items for purchase will show up in the Genius sidebar. Before those similar items though it’ll showcase some of the obvious holes in your collection under the header “Top Songs You Are Missing.” When I played The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes it basically called me a dummy for not owning The Seeker or Magic Bus, and rightfully so.

Once you’ve signed in (depending on the size of your music collection) you might be waiting around for 10 or so minutes before all of your data is shared with Apple. The good news is that once the initial setup is done clicking the Genius button creates a playlist instantaneously. I was a little surprised by this — wouldn’t it need a few seconds to calculate the best plan of action for my listening pleasure?

The results speak for themselves: To test Genius I decided to break out I Don’t Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats. Here’s a sampling of what it brought back;

• Is She Really Going Out With Him? – Joe Jackson
• Werewolves of London – Warren Zevon
• Back on the Chain Gang – The Pretenders
• Echo Beach – Martha & The Muffins
• Veronica – Elvis Costello

Definitely some solid matches! Of course, that’s not to say everything’s going to be perfect. Out of the 25 tracks it brought back I’d say a good 18 or so would have been as good a match as these. Sprinkled between those quality picks though were some out of left field choices like Green Day or dialogue from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack.

Still — a few tracks that you may have to skip lest they kill the vibe isn’t all that bad, and you can always click the Genius button again to get a different set of matches. When I did that this time around it brought some excellent matches from The Smiths and some late Who. It’s just too bad they couldn’t have replaced that bad picks the first time around.

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