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.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 8)
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.
Reply
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?
Reply
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 ???!!).
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!
Reply
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".
Reply
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.
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. =[
Reply
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!
Reply
Jon said 12:51AM on 9-10-2008
I was really hoping that they would announce a Pandora purchase today. Oh well.
With Pandora Apple wouldnt need a subscription service. The purchasing of music that Pandora suggests would pay for the webcasting fees. Even more, it can be viewed as a loss leader, just as the itunes store was portrayed as a break even tool to sell iphones.
The do need to have a real news channel that I can listen to however.
Reply
wayrachaki said 1:14AM on 9-10-2008
http://www.beatunes.com/
can't beat it.
Reply
jc said 1:15AM on 9-10-2008
Not sure how it works with the apple store, but when I selected Billy Joel's "All My Life" , out of 100 songs the only one that doesn't feel like it fits is Barenaked Ladies Big Bang Theory Theme. And maybe "Up Up & Away by Fifth Dimension... it was a bit out there) And it grabbed a fair number of songs I'd never really listened to, that were only in my itunes because I loaded up an ipod full of 60's & 70's music for my mom's birthday a year or two ago. Stuff I wouldn't have gone looking for, don't have in any playlists, but it fit with the rest. So at least for finding interesting stuff in my ~40 gigs of music, I'm pretty impressed. :)
Reply
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.
Reply
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
Reply
Jash Sayani said 2:46AM on 9-10-2008
I think Apple needs to work a little more on their Genius....
Reply
kieran said 2:54AM on 9-10-2008
Mine works great. I think it's a really great feature and has been working well for me. (Maybe because all m music is tagged well). For example it matched Good Charlotte with Bowling for Soup, Bink 182, Sum 41, Bloodhound gang Yellowcard (and then a few odd sons) but mostly right. Kings of leon also generated a good playlist. It will get better hopefully like steve said when everyone starts to use it and theu get the information.
Reply
pakkman781 said 3:06AM on 9-10-2008
I'm having pretty decent results with mine. I didn't expect anything mindblowing, but it's doing an okay job. I put in a song, and it gives me similar songs, with some slight deviation. Like I put in Coldplay - Viva La Vida, and I get U2 - City of Blinding Lights, which actually makes some sense, but I also get Nine Inch Nails - Survivalism, which is an odd choice. It's been live for less than 24 hours, I think it will get better over time.
Reply
Max said 3:28AM on 9-10-2008
It's Pavarotti non "Pavoratti" you noob.
Reply
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.
Reply
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.