Filed under: iTunes
My iTunes Genius is a Moron
Shh. Don't tell anyone. My iTunes Genius is tone deaf. When I selected "Man of Constant Sorrow" as my "seed" song, My Genius actually suggested "America, F**k [sic] Yeah" and "Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky)" at the store. The proper genre, or at least the genre I was looking for, was "Rockin' Bluegrass", not "Obscure Movie Themes". Bzzt. Let's try again.
Next, I tried "Funiculi Funicula" by Pavarotti, a song I knew was in the store. I was told "Genius is unavailable" for that song. Please choose another song or artist. A few more tries revealed that I needed to focus on pop music, not classical or obscure. Well enough. But then I got the same error message for the Beatles' "Long and Winding Road." You know them, a mildly popular band of the 1960s, known for not being sold through iTunes but otherwise not an unthinkable choice in a modern playlist.
Success finally followed for Alison Krauss' "Down to the River to Pray". My genius matched me up with Queen's "Bicycle Race", the Wreckers' "Rain" and Billy Joel's "Say Goodbye to Hollywood." These are not exactly groupings that I would have picked myself. Listening through to the playlist hit home how jarring those selections were.
I expect the Genius feature will only improve, especially as Apple big brothers all our personal music collections but for now I'm so totally not dropping Last.fm any time soon.
How's Genius working for you? Are your playlists sublime or just strange? Let us know in the comments.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 8)
who? said 9:06PM on 9-09-2008
You think that's bad? Mine gave me "Through the Fire and the Flames" by Dragonforce when I clicked "Dream On" by Aerosmith.
WTF is that about?
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Bob said 9:59PM on 9-09-2008
If I click on "Dream On," it recommends a lot of good classic rock to me. The only two songs that it recommends that I don't care for too much are "Kryptonite" by Three Doors Down and "Headstrong" by Trapt.
Sonic said 10:14PM on 9-09-2008
Well they were both in Guitar Hero. :P
d said 7:50AM on 9-10-2008
you think /THAT'S/ bad? I put in "The Saints are Coming" by Green Day and U2 from the New Orleans Superdome in, and I got "Banana Pancakes" by Jack Johnson.
I keep thinking about Genius as Pandora within your library, and I keep looking for "yes" and "no" buttons - that would help Apple a lot if people could tell them if the song selected matches the seed.
Kurra said 10:01PM on 10-14-2008
They're both on Guitar Hero... Ok I guess it shouldn't work like that.
Gilbert Tang said 9:07PM on 9-09-2008
So far, my results have been really good, including within my selection of jazz and indie rock. I've yet to receive an error like that.
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Macintologist said 12:14AM on 9-10-2008
Genius has been working great with me.
billberto said 5:30PM on 9-11-2008
It's been awesome for me; except in every playlist I make, rough gem by the islands shows up. I have about 1500 songs... At least it's a good song.
Alexius said 9:13PM on 9-09-2008
Mine doesn't even match up the songs.
Fail: http://i33.tinypic.com/n4cwty.png
Epic Fail: http://i34.tinypic.com/e1akwh.png
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Galley said 9:18PM on 9-09-2008
I've been waiting for hours for "Apple to process information".
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Josh said 9:18PM on 9-09-2008
Yeah, gotta agree with Gilbert here. My results have all been good so far. Maybe it helps that I've spent hours and hours tagging my music by hand but it works just the way I wanted it to.
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YodaMac said 9:23PM on 9-09-2008
Uh... It clearly states that Genius picks will not be very accurate to begin with, but will get more accurate over time with more use from...well...users.
Did you skip right by the introduction window? ;)
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Alexius said 9:30PM on 9-09-2008
There *is* a difference between somewhat not accurate and being completely out-of-nowhere random. It only seems to work somewhat right with mainstream music, and just lumps other close artists together that are in the mainstream as well. This doesn't necessarily give you a window to new music as much as it just gives you a name to most songs you hear everyday on the radio, anyway.
I guess I'll wait until the databases update before I use it for my purposes. >_>
Niklas said 6:41AM on 9-10-2008
True. According to Jobs during the show the local database will be updated once a week as more and more libraries are scanned and processed. I'll wait until the end of the month before calling the genius feature a moron, but at this moment it is somewhere in the 'meh' to 'nice' department.
Z said 9:25PM on 9-09-2008
when I third to make a genius playlist with Surfin' Safiri as the "seed song" one of sugestions was New Soul.
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Zyber said 9:26PM on 9-09-2008
It still pretty good for me
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Andrew Harrison said 9:26PM on 9-09-2008
Mine have been pretty good thus far. Getting a few local artists in there as well which is suprising [and good]
quite happy for the minute
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surge said 9:28PM on 9-09-2008
i got the error and all i did was hit update Genius in the store menu and it worked for me. it is really great.
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Jason Martin said 9:27PM on 9-09-2008
I've had mixed results. A good one in particular was a playlist with my seed being "She's a Rejecter" by Of Montreal. It picked songs in my library that I wouldn't necessarily have picked, but they actually went very well together.
I agree that much refinement is needed, though.
Also, the Sidebar is as useless as the iTunes Mini Store was.
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emily. said 12:31AM on 9-10-2008
Agreed. The sidebar was the first thing I killed after I got Genius up and running.