I've found Genius good for two things so far: parties where you want to set the tone and noise level, and work-outs. It's been pretty useful in that regard. We had our 4-year olds b-day party on Sunday, and if I'd hit the "Party Mix" option I'd have had profanity in the playlist, not quite what I was looking for, however when I started a genius playlist with "Take On Me" (love it more since the Family Guy spoof) I ended up with light lyrics and a pretty good beat. I think, so far so good.

Persistent1

@Avian00:

The comparison is pretty much automatic. Hell, the Genius sidebar is basically a pay-per-play version of Pandora.

Kinmotsu

I also use weird genres... I have "big band jazz", and "progrssive jazz", so I can make playlists that use "contains jazz", as an example. I also use the genre "Black Music", like in Europe, that includes all soul, hip hop, rap, R&B, Motown, etc. So Genius, no genre fixes from me!

Flyerist

Since I listen mostly to sub-minority genres (progressive rock and the likes), I find the Genius option quite underwhelming.

Also count me in the crowd that prefers to keep personalized genres. I would definetly have prefered a tag-based approach (even though the process of going through 100 GB of music to tag them properly is, to put it lightly, daunting).

Stéphane Gallay

Frankly, I'm not disappointed with this feature. It's a nice way to make a quick not-so-random playlist. Randomly picking songs from my entire library never turns out well. But I don't always have time to make a fully customized playlist. This seems like a nice middle ground. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done.

I still don't get the constant comparison to Pandora. Pandora is a streaming service about discovering new music. Genius playlists are about RE-discovering your own music. Even the Genius sidebar is just a mechanism to suggest iTunes purchases (not a radio service). Let these 2 unique products stand on their own merits.

Avian00

@ticklemeozmo: I don't have a crappily organised library but I also don't have either the time or inclination to go through 50,000 plus songs and check the genre tags on each of them.Not all of them were imported through iTunes and I haven't bought music there in 2 or 3 years.

The concept of removing the tick from the check box doesn't work for me either, I have all my playlists set to only include checked music, I find it a handy way to keep my wife's music off my iPods, deselecting the tick box will remove it from all my playlists, and ultimately my iPods. (Or does removing the tick mark in genius only remove it in genius?)A simple "thumbs up, thumbs down " option to approve, or not, selections would be a huge improvement on this.

I turned it off in my iTunes and I can't see myself turning it back on any time soon.I can create a random playlist with the party shuffle or if I want to group stuff to play together I make a smart playlist like I always did.

Cripesonfriday

Buh. You'll have me "fixing" my genres only after the apocalypse. I have too many metal albums to not split them out by sub-genres. It's my primary organization key.

nomadwolf

Granted, I haven't tried since Friday, but I've got 23,000+ songs in my library, and I was never able to get Genius to work.

illtron

Basically, the gist is, ORGANIZE YOUR LIBRARY. "Garbage in, garbage out", folks. If you have a crappily organized library, you'll get a crappy automated playlist.

ticklemeozmo

Or maybe Apple should have just bought Pandora...

pkscout

@Kinmotsu: Agreed. I think that'd be great.

RZachSmith

Personally, I think if they were going to add a feature like this, they should've included a Pandora-like ability to say "yes, more like this" or "no, no more like this" for each Genius list you make.

Kinmotsu

@ticklemeozmo: Organize my library? Like edit vague Genres like "Rock/Pop." But Lifehacker just told me "Don't customize your genres."

Tony Bullard

I'm not uncustomizing my genres. Death Cab for Cutie are not "Alternative & Punk," which quite frankly is a BS genre.

Jeff Martin

I am just waiting for a hack that lets you select recommendations in itunes that link to amazon downloads directly. DRM-free or die!

redsmurf

Let genius pick 100 songs. Then you have to eliminate twenty. And off you go.

Henry94

The super-scientific study I conducted (read: polling my friends) found a high correlation of Genius dissatisfaction with a user's music snobbery.

superunlikely

@Cripesonfriday: Turning the check mark off in the Genius playlist also turns it off in your regular library.

mrakins

well lucky for me I've always organized my music library using only the genres that iTunes provides. granted, I have wanted to add sub-genres (and I do have a couple), but otherwise genius works pretty well for me.

zikman

@pkscout: I'd hate to see Apple buy Pandora because it's wonderful the way it is and all Apple could do is screw it up. Licensing the info from the Music Genome Project on the other hand is exactly what Apple should do to make the genius playlist feature better. Apple's feature becomes 100x better and the Music Genome Project gets some cash to keep Pandora running, sounds like a win-win to me.

hansonc

I have used Genius since the update with my 12,000+ song library and haven't had an issue. I don't want it to be like Pandora because they are two different things and I like them that way.

I agree with superunlikely- there seems to be a lot of Genius-bashing in the forums, comments, etc. and it seems to come from those people who just HAVE to have their own custom genres, sub-genres, blahblahblah. Whatever you want- I use what iTunes sets it at for the most part and leave it alone. It's always worked for me- just like Genius. ;)

Hockeycop

Here's what disappoints me with Genius:

I understand that they don't want to update firmware for the 5G iPods to include Genius, and I'm not expecting them to... but why can't iTunes create a Genius playlist on my iPod with music from my iPod? I have different sets of music on my work computer than my home computer, and my iPod has music that's not on either one, so I can't just do Genius on the PC and drag the playlist over. Since my iPod, not being the lastest and greatest anymore, can't do Genius on its own, why not still allow my to do it from iTunes using the iPod's library?

Please?

Is anyone else in this boat, or is it just me?

krn

@nomadwolf:

I agree. (Though not with your taste in music. :) )

Why must I call a genre Hip-Hop/Rap? Its as vague as Rock/Pop.

hillscottc

Well with only 3600 songs of music I "could" try and re-tag but I have no want to do that just to get a "little" bit better playlist. Genius is good enough and it does help re-discover music or discover music that I never listened to.

Darkmatter91

I liked Genius until it broke my iPhone from syncing. Like many other users, I started getting "the iPhone cannot be synced. An unknown error occured," and no amount of restarting the phone or iTunes would fix it. Turning off Genius was the only way to fix it. I'll try it again once apple fixes this, presumably with iPhone 2.1.1.

jordan314

I found great improvement when I switched to Zune's MixView... and so did Giz:
[gizmodo.com]

IsaacCaba?ero

For some reason, I continually get unchecked songs when generating my Genius playlists, so I don't really think that helps all that much :P . I also can't stand having "[Disk 1]" and so on appear at the end of my album names since that causes iTunes to split the whole entry off into a different album (it does this automatically). I'm absolutely not going to switch them back to what they were originally.

Styyl

just a total aside, but when someone says "i have 50,000 songs in my library in itunes ... " I immediately calculate the "itunes store" cost of about $40,000 - if you had actually paid for them, of course. My second thought is one of awe as I consider how much physical space 50,000 songs would have taken up as cassettes or CD's.

TechTalk WRLR 98.3FM

this is how i get better, more targeted results:

[www.alternapop.com]

alternapop

Does anyone know where this advice is coming from? I would be willing to try some of this if I knew the Genius code actually used star ratings and genre names but if these are guesses or lies, I don't see the point.

bricklayer

I'm surprised to hear all the disappointed posts. I've been using iTunes for three or four years now, and this is one of the most ground breaking additions I can remember. I also have a large library of music but I never have the time (or frankly, the desire) to put together custom playlists. This solves that problem perfectly.

raidzero550

@superunlikely: I tend to agree with this. Almost all of my music falls under their "Alternative & Punk" genre, which is beyond stupid. M83 and Minor Threat are not the same genre, thanks much. I'm certainly not going through and breaking all my tags so it can work.

It's a shame Pandora isn't going to be around much longer. :[

urukhaifive

If Genius relies on bad genre tagging, I'm not going to pander to it. It's nothing more than a 250 mb curiosity for me - Last.fm suits me fine.

Richaod

This advice about genres is completely wrong. I set the genre of almost every track I import to 'None', as the defaults are inevitably stupid, and Genius works fine for me. I count myself a music snob and I'm not disappointed in it at all, it's a great new way to listen to what's in my library and the store suggestions mostly make sense as far as I can see.

I'm waiting for them to add a 'Verity Sharp Effect' that will follow Débussy with Tom Waits, but this may not mean much to people who don't listen to BBC Radio 3 late at night ;-)

nekomatic

@nomadwolf: Same here. I'm fiercely protective of my genre choices and there's no way I am going to default them to somebody else's choices. (I once ported my library to WMP and just that happened - I was furious.) That said, genius works fine for me. I don't mind if something doesn't "fit" - I like somewhat eccentric playlists anyway.

Rhywun

@illtron: I also have 23,000 songs and I had to let Genius run overnight. I think it takes a while to categorize and upload all that information. So try it again, it was well worth it for me.

magnus91