iTunes 8 - Smarter to the Genius Level

Posted on 17 Sep 2008 16:36:15 by John Slater

A little over 1 week ago iTunes 8.0 was released to coincide with the new iPod Nanos, iPod Touches and iPhone update, with several new features the software is certainly something clever.

Genius
The biggest new feature and certainly the thing Steve Jobs was overly excited about was the new iTunes Genius feature. iTunes Genius will will take all the information about your songs and send them to Apple's massive server farm where algorithms try to find people who like similar music to yourself, this allows them to then send back information about songs that are similar and also recommend new songs.

The feature sounds all fine and dandy but i can think of one service that does a much better job than Genius called 'Last.fm' which recommends music you might like, Last.fm also lets you listen to the track in full before you decide whether to buy it or not.

My personal experience with this feature has been quite good in the past few days and it is getting better as Apple said it would once more people started using it. The first time i tried it on release day it wasn't very good, in fact it assumed every song was similar to Alphabeat which is by no means true which allowed me to give it the nickname 'Retarded Genius'

Grid View
Another Display method has been added to iTunes allowing the covers of all Songs, Albums, Podcasts, TV Shows and Movies to be displayed in one big grid with resizable artwork to save space.

I love this feature and it really makes me think "why? why not sooner" because it's such a nice and obvious way of displaying albums and Podcasts even more so.

I have found one major flaw with this display method and is one that i'm Apple know about and is intentional but it still doesn't change the fact that it sucks. When you display using Grid view you cannot shuffle all the music within the playlist, it will only shuffle the album you have selected - this one flaw makes it hard for the display method to become number 1 and instead has to fall at number 2 on my list.

Visualisations
This is quite an unpublicised feature in the new version but it's a brilliant feature. Visualisations mean you can see your music, iTunes has had this feature in the past but like Windows Media Player they suck really bad and look like they were created in the 60's.

The new visualisation looks like a planet with a magnetic-field around with star-like particles expanding and compressing to the beat of the music. The visualisation also changes slightly to make every song slightly different each look just as good.

Other Features
iTunes 8.0 is also packed with small updates and changes to make everything work better. Here is my list of other updates...
- Unwatched Videos, Podcasts & Movies now has a circle and the number of unwatched instances within it.
- Genius Playlist
- Genius Sidebar - Recommends songs you don't own
- Visualiser
- Better Screen Reader Support
- HD TV Shows via iTunes
- Remote (iPhone App) now supports genius playlists

Overall
I really suggest getting the new version, it is a nice improvement on the last version and the new features outlined above only improve the experience.