Genius is no Einstein
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I’ve long held that while I’ve loved the iPod since first launch, the major piece missing has been the DJ’ing functionality– I often times would rather “outsource the DJ” (have a smart program control my library) rather than do it myself. I have 40GBs of music and often can’t think of what to play.
Finally to the rescue: Apple’s new Genius feature, which I put to the test. The functionality centers on basically being Pandora for iTunes (this concept agreed to by Apple people I spoke to during the launch).
When you first activate Genius in iTunes, it takes a while for your entire library to communicate with the server. I imagine this is because your songs now get some sort of dna-type tag so iTunes can identify them by genre, feel, etc.
You can then ‘Start Genius’ based on any song in your library you choose. I chose “Us & Them” by Pink Floyd, assuming I’d then have a solid stream of dreamy yet strong tunes for when I’m motorcycle cruising around in the mountains.
Well, the list was interesting and entertaining. But oddly curious. Not really sure how the list it generated was really “songs that go great together”, and whether simply hitting the ‘random’ function would fare much better. Smart list? It didn’t suggest any real oddballs, but I’d hesitate to call it ‘genius’. Still, an interesting feature, fun to use, and I was entertained on this weekend’s Pocono Mountains ride.
One thing to note, the way I used it was to open iTunes, generate the Genius playlist and copy the list to the iPod. It is killer to have this on the go, but that is only available on the new Nano and 1 or 2 other brand new models. The 1-year-old Classic can NOT be upgraded for this. And the richness of the list is certainly affected by the depth of your collection, so small hard-drived iPods like the Nano will be challenged.
