Yeah, that. I work with a guy who uses iTunes that way and he’s never been able to explain why in any way that makes sense to me. The whole beauty of iTunes is using it as a media manager to populate your various devices from a master catalog. I lost one iPod and destroyed another. It makes me wince thinking about how I’d replace all that music, especially the stuff I bought online.
I have always wondered why I can’t do smart shuffle on my ipod. I can do it in itunes, but not on the ipod. I rarely use itunes as a music player, so smart shuffle doesn’t do me much good there. It seems like it would be a simple thing to include that feature in the ipod software, but NO for some reason.
Well, I haven’t used Genius yet (my computer currently runs on steam and coal oil), but I have had good results with Music-map.com, in the past. It’s how I discovered the Dresden Dolls, as I recall.
I make backups of my music to DVDs. There is no reason to keep a copy of EVERY song on my harddrive (55GB!) when my ipod’s connected to my computer whenever I’m home. I never understood Apple’s mentality of this autosync thing. Well, their mentality is just a “oh big deal if your ipod breaks, cuz we have a backup for you that’s taking up half your harddrive anyway” … but this is going too far.
OTOH, there’s no good reason to have to hook your iPod up to your computer to play your music at home. And, if your iPods dies, you’ll have a bigger hassle restoring your new one from a load of DVDs.
55 gigs? How much music do you have?
If 55GB is half of your hard drive, you have a pretty tiny drive by today’s standards. 1TB drives are barely over $100, and 500GB drives can be had for $50.
For the sake of comparison I have 70 gigs of music and that works out to be ~13,000 songs on my external drive.
I asked because I haqve about 4000 songs on 8 gigs. You must not use any compression at all.
I tried that for a while when I was in the States last year, and it never recommended anything I liked. I looked at some of the comparison parameters it was using, and it was things like “has a trumpet”. I don’t listen to song X because it has a trumpet in it. Pandora et al uses parameters that are easily quantifiable, but I’m not sure that what makes me like a song is so easily quantified. (Maybe it is, but the song would have to be rated according to its melodic features, and AFAIK nobody has figured out how to do that yet.)
I’ve found the genius to be…well slightly smarter then random. I have a pretty large and diverse library (11,000 songs). The issue that I regularly run into is that if I’m shuffling in a genre (let’s say rock), I get all kinds of rock songs that really don’t “go” together. For example, it may go from Green Day to Three Inches of Blood to Air Supply. If I use the genius, it will pick Green Day, Foo Fighters, Sum 41, you know stuff that more or less goes together.
I will say that almost every time I do a genius playlist, there is one or two outliers out of a hundred, these I just delete out of the playlist. Just now I did a 100 songs off of “Girl From Ipanema” and it picked 100 songs out of my Jazz and Blues genres that seem to go along nicely, but for some reason it decided 'Walk Like An Egyptian" went in there too.
Because I charge it via the firewire port, so has to be connected anyway. So what’s the point of keeping a 55GB chunk of my harddrive when I have a second copy right there on my ipod’s? Having the extra harddrive space is less of a hassle than making a backup every couple months of the stuff I added to the ipod.
Regardless, it doesn’t sound like I’m missing much by not being able to use Genius.
ETA - I have a total of 850GB. And a good 750GB of those are in use and I like to have plenty of wiggle room. I was refering to pre-built systems that usually come with 80 or 120GB drives, which casual users tend to have.
I’ve done that. It’s pretty basic.
Also, it doesn’t recognize about a third of my songs. Evidently, I am mistaken that there was a group called “The Beatles.” :rolleyes:
If it’s not in the iTunes Store, the song doesn’t exist.
I’m way too much of a control freak to let a machine pick my music for me. I use smart playlists to organize my music according to album, and then treat it exactly as I’ve treated my record collection for the last 40 years.
In fact, there’s a few ‘smart’ features I’d love to turn off. On podcasts, it does this thing to news podcasts every week or so - it gives me an error message saying “iTunes has stopped downloading this podcast because you have not listened to it in a while.” It’s easy to cure with a click, but it raises my blood pressure that the computer thinks it’s smarter than me. Listen, you piece of crap, it’s the news! If I didn’t listen to it yesterday, there’s no point today, I delete it. I’ll tell YOU when I do or don’t want to stop downloading something.
Am I the only one who hates ‘genre’? I’ll decide how I think of my music, thanks! I had a guitar student who was asking me the oddest questions about various bands until I figured out he was talking about genre as defined by the CDDB. (“But The Who are classic rock, whereas Led Zeppelin is heavy metal. They couldn’t have influenced each other”)
Pardon an old fart ranting…
Beatles, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, it’s definitely a big weakness of the system that it doesn’t recognize these artists. I still use it though because it makes better playlists than the basic shuffle if I want to listen to some random stuff while working. If they were to remove it it wouldn’t bother me much though.
I agree 100%, the database is maintained by Gracenote and I hate the way they do the genres, I rarely agree with the information the database provides for genre.