Taking my lead from my blog muse, Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein, I thought I’d finally relent to that obnoxious "Update" window that popped up each time I opened iTunes and upgrade to Version 8.0. I’d tinkered at home with the latest function, "Genius," which gathers data from your play history and composes recommended playlists based on songs picked from your music library, and thought I’d post some playlists here. (After all, Muxtape isn’t coming back any time soon.)
Ideally, the program runs like Pandora, except that iTunes ties it to the Apple music store to make it a bit more like shopping. John Naughton at The Guardian published his take on the addition, which points out that Genius functions like a less-successful version of Amazon, and relies on other iTunes user profiles to order your music. Hell is other people deciding what’s on the box. Kidding.
Unfortunately, the small mouse that runs on a wheel inside my trusty eMac to generate the power necessary for the machine to function recently died. (I’d named him "eMacaroni"; I’m currently searching for a replacement mouse.) This harshes my mellow more than a tall glass of Haterade; namely, because I’d hoped to use iTunes’ Genius to give some love to the new album from GZA/Genius, Pro Tools.
More Genius than Steve Jobs: GZA beat iTunes to the punch and released his latest, Pro Tools, before the newest iTunes upgrade.
Anyways, I’m eager to hear what sort of experiences you’ve had with iTunes Genius; post some playlists and some thoughts below. As for me, I’ll post my own playlist later; all this tech talk is giving me some serious delirium.