Is itunes 8 going to be a genius, or a dunce?
This evening has seen the installation of iTunes 8 after today’s Apple presentation. The only real reason to upgrade is to play with the new Genius functionality. For those that haven’t seen the speech yet, Genius is supposed to make suggestions of other artists or songs in your library that go with a song of your choice. It also offers you songs from the store. The snag? They want your itunes library and listening habits.
I know a lot of people will complain about Apple gathering information; personally if it means I get more out of my music collection… then I’m all for it. It does, however, look like it’s going to take a few hours for itunes to work it’s way through my rather extensive (30,000+ track) library… so I somehow doubt I’ll get to play with it tonight. It should be ready to generate me tomorrow’s playlist though 
My main concern/interest is in seeing how well it copes with bands/songs that aren’t in the itunes store, or a rather eclectic music collection. I strongly suspect that the genius functionality is only going to work for songs the store knows about; though in the speech there was a mention of the system improving as more data is collected from subscribers. Whether this just means it’ll get better at suggesting stuff from the store, or whether it starts to know about small bands like DeadDogInBlackBag is something I’ll look forward to finding out.
The other update to the software is giving yet another way to browse your music. In addition to the list and cover flow options, there’s now browse by artist/album that displays the album covers as a grid (see screenshot on the link above). In artist view it will tell you how many albums/tracks each artist has and allow you to drill into it. While it’s interesting to look at for 5 minutes, I doubt it’s going to be all that useful in actual practice unless you have a collection made mostly from compilations. We shall see…
Sorry for the sidetrack from Reddot, but expect to see the occasional deviation into music, computers and design as well 
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