Trying out iTunes 8
I was actually just saying to the Snook recently that my #1 wished-for feature in a media player is the ability to make playlists that are musically similar. There are plenty of services on the web that can say “If you like artist X, you’ll probably like artist Y,” but I wanted the ability to go, “I’m in the mood for jangly upbeat folk pop songs. Play me some of that.”* Imagine my surprise today to see that this is a major feature of the new iTunes! You highlight a song in your library and click a special button, and it creates a “Genius” playlist of things that are similar. I’ve been playing with it all day and so far it seems to work pretty well. I selected a Del Amitri song (the aforementioned jangly pop) and I got lots of other things in the same sort of vein. It worked pretty well with a Cure song too. The only moment of FAIL so far was when I used XTC’s “Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” as the basis. Somehow the fourth song on the playlist ended up being “Alfie” by Cilla Black! I really want to see the algorithm that produced that oddity.
* And no, using the “genre” tag in iTunes to make a smart playlist doesn’t really work. You can’t have more than one genre on a song, so you’d have to be REALLY SPECIFIC in your tag. Not to mention the fact that there are still thousands of songs in our library with missing or incorrect genres…
John
September 11, 2008 — 7:11 am
I’m very impressed with the Genius playlist feature: it could only be improved if it allowed you to select multiple songs and produced a playlist that matched the mood/genre/style/whatever of all selected tracks. I appreciate that would be a much tougher trick to pull off, so I’ll take what I can get. (On the other hand, I find the Genius Sidebar pointless: it’s too cramped and doesn’t always recognise the songs I already have in my library. Fortunately, it’s easily ignored.)
For me, the number one welcome feature in iTunes 8 is the ability to set per-podcast preferences for downloading and retaining podcasts. I have lots of podcasts which I want to monitor but where I may not feel like listening to every episode, and it was a real chore to have iTunes download all unplayed episodes only for me to have to winnow out the podcast episodes I don’t care to listen to. Per-podcast preferences was the one feature that might have persuaded me to use another program to manage my podcasts, and now I have it without having to switch programs.
Finally, I agree that genres are hopeless in iTunes. I keep hoping they’ll switch to a tag-based system but Apple disappoint me with every update.
Kris
September 11, 2008 — 8:53 am
Ooooh, I didn’t even notice that podcast feature yet! That’ll be awesome.
crumpet
September 12, 2008 — 11:06 am
I tried this yesterday by choosing mayonaise by Smashing Pumpkins as my base song. It was brilliant. I’m in love.
crumpet
September 12, 2008 — 11:07 am
Crap. My code skillz in the morning are not good…
Kris
September 12, 2008 — 12:58 pm
Fixed it for you.
My experience has been hit-or-miss. When it’s good, it’s very good. But there are a LOT of songs in my library where Genius is inexplicably not available. I guess the name I have for the song doesn’t match exactly what’s in the iTMS? I’d also love the ability to give a thumbs-down for stuff that doesn’t match well so that the algorithm could get better in the future. (ARE YOU LISTENING, STEVE!?)