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 4 of 8)
makeinu said 10:58PM on 9-09-2008
Hah! I've got them all beat, including Pandora. Big surprise here: 15 GB of Japanese rock doesn't mix well with "mainstream" American music recommendation services. Thanks, but I'll stick to doing it all by hand.
Looks like I'll skip this version of iTunes, at least until I buy a new iPod.
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A Miller said 11:00PM on 9-09-2008
I just tried of couple of Genius playlists and they were awesome. It has worked just as advertised- it put songs from my library together in a playlist that sound great. It has picked some songs I forgot or didn't know I had that I really like and that I haven't listened to in awhile. I have mostly ignored the sidebar, but the recommendations don't look that bad to me.
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neko said 10:59PM on 9-09-2008
mine seems to either work wonders or refuse to believe the band exists, even after updating. haven't gotten any out-of-left-field recommendations yet
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Erik said 11:05PM on 9-09-2008
Pandora plays the entire song...so I can see if I actually like the new song that is being fed to me. iTunes' Genius just allows me to listen to a snippet of other songs. How can I decide to make a purchase on just 20 seconds?
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Tony said 5:01AM on 9-10-2008
As does last.fm - Genius just isn't on the same level. It seems to be just taking the existing functionality from the itunes store that's been there for ages and sticking it in a UI.
Now if it could create a playlist entirely made of recommendations and play that It'd be getting there. The algorithm would still suck though (I selected Within Temptation and it suggested.. The Eurythmics ???!!).
aj_robins said 11:04PM on 9-09-2008
Bleah. Since the content is user-generated, a lot of people are probably trying to Rickroll everyone.
Hopefully, within a week or two, the masses will generate enough suggestions to override the Rickrollers.
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Micah Vanderlinden said 11:27PM on 9-09-2008
My genius playlist are really good! Great time saver. Putting things together like John Frusciante's Murderers with Ratatat's Seventeen Years. Genius I tell ya!
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Jay said 4:39AM on 9-10-2008
I'm getting random results as well. Does anyone have a link to a good iTunes tagger. All my songs have Song Name and Artist, but most don't have anything else. 9k songs would be a pain to do by hand.
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emily. said 12:35AM on 9-10-2008
I recommend MusicBrainz: http://musicbrainz.org/ . Their tagger, Picard, will help you with most of your tracks (and does handy things like auto-fill in the "sort by" data with the rest of the tag fields you fill).
Tony said 5:21AM on 9-10-2008
That's probably not going to work for 9000 songs. I added 2000 to the OSX version and it went into spinning beachball of death and had to be forcibly terminated.
Tried it on a small list of 8. 6 it said 'Acoustic fingerprint not in musicbrainz' and 2 it got utterly and hopelessly wrong. And this isn't obscure stuff.. I deliberately picked a bunch of well known songs.
It's a long way to go compared to Shazam that does similar matching over a microphone, and seems to get it right 90% of the time.
emily. said 10:46AM on 9-10-2008
Dear goodness, you don't do *all* your songs at once, and you should check the results before saving the tags. You can also search the MusicBrainz database manually, click a link to have your selection pulled up in the tagger, and then put your song with the correct tags. It's not completely magical, but it's much faster than correcting all your tags by hand. I have an obscene amount of music, and MusicBrainz has made having correct tags possible for most of it.
cj_ said 11:34PM on 9-09-2008
This is just a thinly veiled way to sell more shit from their music store, the playlists they generate could very well be random. It's telling that you can't disable the sidebar and still use the playlists.
Blatant marketing ploy, don't waste your time with this "feature".
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emily. said 12:41AM on 9-10-2008
The button in the very bottom right-hand corner of the iTunes window will make the Genius sidebar go away. Yes, I'm sure they'd love to sell you more music, but you can also hide the store recommendations and live happily.
Carlo said 9:45PM on 9-17-2008
So far, the Genius has been right on in terms of tone. In other words, the lists 'feel' right and sound cohesive for my first few playlists. It's at least as accurate as Pandora and WAAAYYY more accurate than Napster's auto playlists.
I give it a B+!
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Patrick said 12:05AM on 9-10-2008
Am I the only one who has not been able to get this working at all? Since I've downloaded the update 6 hrs ago, I've been stuck on the second step, "Sending information to Apple..." and I just tried emptying preferences and disabling firewalls to no avail. I only have 5000 songs and I haven't heard anything about Apple's servers being overloaded. I can't seem to figure out what's wrong. =[
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PeterToo said 12:22AM on 9-10-2008
Worked alright... I picked Depeche Mode's Enjoy The Silence, and was suggested a list that included a-ha, New Order, Pet Shop Boys and Tears For Fears amongst others. Not bad, really!
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Dusty Chalk said 3:50PM on 9-17-2008
So, I tried to run Genius against "Genius" by Pitchshifter...and the world ended. Been nice knowing youse all. :/
Seriously -- seconded, thirded, and the motion carries on Pandora -- now *that* is genius.
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wayrachaki said 1:14AM on 9-10-2008
http://www.beatunes.com/
can't beat it.
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Quine said 2:33AM on 9-10-2008
I was pleasently surprised at how well it's worked for me so far, especially when it appropriately matched up DJ? Acucrack with Pendulum and a few other obscure artists.
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bradv10@gmail.com said 2:43AM on 9-10-2008
mine has gotten way smarter since i downloaded it this aternoon... if you update it, i think it's been getting smarter as the day has been going on with all the new data from users
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