So for those who aren’t familiar, iTunes has this feature called “Genius” which allows you to select a song and then instantly create a playlist of up to 100 songs from your collection that it thinks will mesh well with it.
It also automatically creates 12 “Genius Mixes” which are essentially radio stations of your music.
I have to say, I don’t know how this thing works. But it creates some pretty damn cool mixes.
They maintain a database of what songs everybody has in their library, and how they have them rated, so they can determine that if many people who like Song A also have and like Song B, you’ll probably like Song B if you like Song A.
The mixes feature is new, and rather than just creating a suggested list of accompanying songs based on a selected song, it analyzes your library and determines what songs tend to gel together within the same genre.
Passively crowdsourced data analysis ftw.
Yesh it’s pretty cool. I haven’t played around with the mixer one yet but I’ll point out for anyone curious that you have to upgrade to itunes 9 and after that you still have to explicitly turn it on in the menu bar (update genius).
Not really. They all-too-often can’t find matches for the people I pick, and the matches are done on a pretty obvious basis. (Artist is a blues artist; let’s pick other artist who play blues! Takes a ton of computing sophistication to decide that. :rolleyes:)
Well it all depends on how many songs are in your library and now common they are amongst the rest of the iTunes-using populous, since it can only play songs you already have. If your entire library is Miles Davis, no real surprise what it’s going to play.
However, if you turn on the sidebar it will suggest songs you *don’t *have that you might like.
And those have been laughably inaccurate – songs I know of but can’t stand.
I have thousands of songs in my library, though admittedly many are not common in the iTunes population. People like the Beatles, for instance. Obviously obscure groups like that are going to be ignored, but the feature really doesn’t do anything better than selecting the “blues” label, or, indeed, just using the random play feature.
I’ve been using the Genius Mix feature too, and my experience has generally been favorable. And it doesn’t just pick artists from the same genre, either; I’ll get a good mix of Rock, Blues, Alternative & Punk, etc. in one mix. From what I’ve read, it works best when you haven’t made customized changes to the genres available in iTunes; maybe that could account for the variance in experience.
Sounds like musical Myer-Briggs. You pick songs you like and store them in your iTunes and then this sophisticated scientific tool selects some of them, calling the selection a “mix”, and you are surprised that you find the result agreeable.
I haven’t tried Genius much. I never had luck with the Shuffle feature because my collection is too diverse. I’d be driving along in my car, listening to a rock song song, then some classical music would come on, then a random chapter from an audiobook, and maybe a recording of a prank call or something.
At the risk of sounding like some kind of Apple fanboy (I’m really not), that’s not at all what we’re saying (well, that’s not what I’m saying). The function tries to match its selections in terms of mood and (mostly) genre, so, although the songs are already in your collection, the specific mix is not (and of course, it’s no guarantee two songs you like go together in the same playlist). For me, it’s been more “hit” than “miss” lately, so I think their database is getting better. If I understand it correctly, they’re attempting much the same thing the guys at the Music Genome Project (the people responsible for Pandora Radio) are doing.
See above - this is exactly the kind of thing Genius is supposed to address. If your tracks are all categorized correctly by genre, it’s unlikely Genius would give you such a bizarre grouping. It’s not just a shuffle feature.
You know you can go to the “edit information” parts of songs and unselect them to be played on shuffle. That’s what I do to all the skits and random things (like 20 second blank tracks) that are included on CD’s so they don’t play during my shuffle time. But I enjoy having my classical music followed by my Gangster Rap followed by Meatloaf into a live RHCP Concert.
Thanks for that tip. While I like mixing up genres there’s not much I can do with banjo lesson tracks while I’m driving home from work.
I have a pretty diverse selection as well. Almost 8000 songs comprising nearly every genre of classic rock, alternative & indie rock, electronica, hip hop and some random stuff like reggae, movie soundtracks and so on. While not perfect 100% of the time, the mixes tend to be surprisingly good with few jarring WTF moments.
Yea, I’ve got MIDI Beethoven practice tracks. I simply made an automatic playlist for everything except that stuff and shuffle that.
There, you’ve got the opposite problem. Everyone likes the Beatles, so it doesn’t tell us (or the computer) anything about your musical tastes when you tell us you like the Beatles.
There’s a similar feature in Banshee, a music player for Linux. It doesn’t use “crowdsourcing” though, as it seems to scan all files and analyse them to make its recommendations.
They must look at all sorts of information like people’s playlists, BPM counts, iTunes downloads and whatnot to put together these lists. For example, if I select “Eleanor Rigby” it determined in my collection “Killer Queen” by Queen and “Money” by Pink Floyd are two of the most common songs in probably thousands of playlists containing “Eleanor Rigby”. Most of the songs predictably are not too hard, not too soft classic/psychadelic/progressive rock from the 60s and 70s but it also threw in “Last Night” by The Strokes and some Blues Traveler as well. And all the songs run about 70-120 BPM.
I’m usually fairly impressed with genius but I recently bought one somewhat shallow pop track that’s totally outside the range of the rest of my library and taste, and later when I went to the store genius suggestions it suggested two tracks by them!
First of all, of course it tells about my musical tastes and it should then be picking music that sounds like the Beatles.
Second, what I meant was that, up until recently, iTunes didn’t realize that there was a group named the Beatles. I see that’s been fixed. But let’s see what it does with them:
I picked “Michelle” and here’s what “Genius” came up with:
My Generation (The Who)
Brain Damage (Pink Floyd)
Street Fighting Man (Stones)
Good Times Bad Times (Zeppelin)
Lola (Kinks)
The Weight (The Band)
Manic Depression (Jimi Hendrix)
Friend of the Devil (Grateful Dead)
Midnight Rider (ABB)
Locomotive Breath( Jethro Tull)
Solsbury Hill (Peter Gabriel)
Roundabout (Yes)
Pinball Wizard (The Who).
So starting with a gentle ballad, we don’t get anything that’s even close musically. It merely picks British Invasion bands, with a couple of American groups of the late 60s. There is no indication of anything other than the crudest of any choices.
Sure I like the picks; they wouldn’t be on my computer if I didn’t. But the playlist is completely unimaginative and ultimately pretty dull. I’d rather use a random playlist which always comes up with combinations I wouldn’t have thought of.
Just for the heck of it, let’s try B. B. King’s version of Louis Jordan’s “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby.”
Cakewalk into Town (Taj Mahal)
Wang Dang Doodle (Koko Taylor)
Gonna Move (Susan Tedsechi)
The Door (Keb’ Mo’)
Cherry Red Wine (Jonny Lang)
St. Louis Blues (Louis Armstrong)
Let the Good Times Roll (Louis Jordan)
Statesboro Blues (Blind Willie McGell)
Boom Boom (John Lee Hooker)
Stop Breakin Down Blues (Robert Johnson).
Yup. As I expected. Only “Let the Good Times Roll” and maybe “St. Louis Blues” is anything musically like the first song. “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” is jazz and swing. But “Genius” picks a bunch of blues musicians . The algorithm is clearly “Pick artists from the same time and same genre.” Hardly sophisticated programming.
I have to agree with RealityChuck. I have around ten thousand songs in iTunes, so it has a lot to choose from. But my experience with Genius is just like RealityChuck’s. I’ve tried making a number of Genius playlists, and I have yet to get one where the songs were by any stretch musically similar. Start with a Guess Who song? The playlist is just random “oldies”. Start with a Saga song? The playlist is mostly progressive. They’re clearly picked based on the (few) object criteria that are in the metadata, like genre, year, and the gross-level “artists who are similar”, rather than anything approaching songs that are similar.