hopinet

iTunes, Genius or not?

27th October 2009

I’ve had a couple of days off to do a bit of decorating, I don’t mind painting, in fact a quite enjoy it, especially when the room looks so much better when I’ve finished. I do like to listen to music when I do any house work and when painting is no exception. It’s about the only time I really get to listen to music, painting doesn’t use much of my brain power so I can actually just enjoy the music. I’m not a great fan of setting up iTunes playlists so I thought I’d give the iTunes Genius feature a go. I know it’s a feature that’s been out for ages but I just thought I would let you know whether I think it actually is Genius…. or not.

I’ve always found it annoying that in iTunes you can’t (or I’ve never found a way to) start playing a track then scroll through your music library, click on tracks and add to the end of a current playlist. I know it doesn’t really take that long to set up a playlist but it’s just a feature of WinAmp, my previous music player from my PC days before I made the mac switch, that I found really useful and have never really got used to the iTunes way of doing it. I find it quicker to set up a playlist on my iPhone than I do on my mac, which I find a bit weird, but I think it is probably user error rather than anything wrong with iTunes.

Anyway the Genius feature. Simple. Find a track you like, start playing it, click the genius button and you get a mix of songs in a similar style. You can set the number of songs you want 25/50/75/100 and off it goes. Lets get the bad bits over with first. 2 major ones really. I wish it would have an unlimited songs option so it just keeps going until you press stop and I wish it would use the records of what tracks you’ve played and take that into account when you do a new mix on the same day. Hope that made sense, I’ll try and explain the second point better. You create a genius mix of 25 songs, listen to them and it finishes, you then select another song in the same genre and create another mix. You quite often get some of the tracks that you’ve just listened to in the first mix appeating in the second mix, even though I have 100s of tracks in said genre to chose from. I found this a little annoying I wanted a new mix not the same again.

OK that’s the bad, now the good. It did a pretty good job of providing me with a decent mix of music that went together, I’ve discovered some songs that I never knew I had or I’d forgotten I had and really like. It’s so easy to set up a playlist, even my Mum, who finds sending a text message a little difficult, could set up a genius list with ease.

So is it Genius?
It’s a quick way to set up a playlist in iTunes and a nice way to discover your music collection but I don’t think it is quite Genius, the repeat selecting of the same songs makes it a little irritating if you do a few mixes in quick succession.