iTunes 8 – Not much of a genius so far

Too many people expect too much from Apple these days. After giving you Intel processors, updated MacBooks and a freakin’ phone, Apple fanboys are never satisfied. Hell, even the investors are all crazy over Steve Job’s appearance. Perhaps the corporation in Cupertino can’t cure AIDS, end poverty and bring world peace at every meeting with the press they have. Be freakin’ glad that they are giving you stuff for free Not only they have blessed our behinds with iTunes 8, they finally managed to give us HD TV shows (NBC included) AND a free firmware update! (unless you are a first generation iPod touch user still on 1.0 lol).

Still, there needs to be more nitpicking before the day is done.

iTunes 8 is not much of a drastic change design wise from iTunes 7. The leap from 6 to 7 was pretty darn huge, but don’t let that fool you. The headliner in this update is the Genius recommendation system, in similar vein to Pandora or Last.fm. It analzyes ALL of the music in your library and compares it every iTunes user in the world. After all of that number crunching, it will shoot out a list of recommendations based on your listening habits, playlists and song titles. Right now, it really works well if your song and genre closely matches how iTunes names their song. Say for example I have the song “Brokenhearted” by Brandy named exactly like that. It will give you recommendations based on that song. I have the song named “Brokenhearted f Wanyan Morris of Boyz II Men” (I’m crazy like that since I don’t like two or more artists in the name of a song, so I pick out the primary artist.) Genius gets confused and says it can’t create a list based on that track. How dumb of you “Genius”. On top of that, it will STILL recommed the song in the side panel!

Couldn't you figure it out smarty pants?

Hmmm. Look like the Genius FAILED.

If you happen to listen to music that is out of the sphere of the RIAA or even this country, good luck right now in getting a recommendation! I did manage to get recommendations on J-Pop star Utada Hikaru (She goes by the name of “Utada” in the U.S ) who is not well known in this country outside of the J-Pop fandom. For many of my J-Pop, Anime and Game sountracks on the other hand, knowing is half the battle. I’m hoping that this feature eventually gets better as the weeks and months pass on. On the other hand, I’m about to do a reformat of my PC and I am NOT looking forward to iTunes scanning all of my tracks for Genius again. It took me close to 90 minutes to get my collection of nearly 70GB to get analyzed.

All is not lost. The new album grid feature is a lot more intuitive than Cover Flow. (something that is more suited for an iPhone/iPod Touch.) Now, all genres are all sorted out with appropiate artwork in a form that is similar to iPhoto. You can even scroll over the genre and randomly “scrub” over albums. I’m glad that Apple is making cover art a very important part of the iTunes and iPod experience. Back in the day, no one really had cover art (especially if you downloaded your stuff illegally). Now if you catch a hot torrent of that latest release it is pretty much a prerequisite. Once again, if you listen or watch stuff that is REALLY out of the mainstream, your genre will not match up. I hope someone creates genre artwork for my Anime and Game music. At least Apple was thinking RIGHT when I saw this…

YES.

iPod Touch 2.1 update is out now. I’m still waiting for the iPhone update. I hope they fix up the problems that still plauge the 3g.