The new Genius function in iTunes 9 surprises me, but first, a little bit of history:

When the Genius Playlist function come out last year in iTunes 8, it was an alright feature for me.  The selection from Genius at first wasn’t too good, but improved over time.  But there’s always a problem I have with it is the lack of support of Chinese songs.  Granted there’s no Chinese iTunes Music Store, so there’s technically no songs in the iTunes Store that has Chinese character, hence there shouldn’t be able to generate any playlist since there is no information for it to based on.  However, slowly I discovered there IS Chinese songs in the iTunes Store in the World section! The only problem is the cataloging is horrible!  The metadata of the songs are either in English translation or worst, translated phonetically!  But then there are a few that actually contain Chinese characters in the metadata.  There is no consistency  at all.  The same artists can appeared 3 times because of this problem.  But in any case, the very few that contain Chinese characters, if I seed a song from those artists (4 in total, I counted), I would be able to generate a Genius Playlist, but only for songs from those 4 artists and only if those songs are on the iTunes Store.  As you can see, it really doesn’t work well for me given half of my music is in Chinese! Oh well, at least it works okay for my English songs.

Fast forward to the introduction of iTunes 9 last week with the addition of Genius Mixes.  Out of the 12 Mixes Genius generated, I got 5 Pop, 4 Rock, 1 R&B, 1 Oldies and 1 Canton Pop!  Now if you don’t know, these Mixes are very different than the regular Genius Playlist.  You do not need to select a “seed” song for it to generate, it all happens automatically if you turn on or update Genius.  Another different is that you don’t know what is in the mix because we can’t see what songs are contained in the mix, but I was able to determine how many songs are in the mix from how many songs it got transfer to my iPhone.  It looks like each mix has around 200+ songs?  With that information in mind, I was particularly curious about the Canton Pop mix because if there are only those 4 Chinese artists and a few albums, there is no way it can add up to 200+ songs.  And to my surprise there are many other Chinese artists in my library got put into the mix! finally Genius know another language, for real this time!!!  I immediately tried out the old regular Genius Playlist function to see if it also works on my other Chinese songs as well and it surely did! and the result was good too!!! Like if the seed song I selected is an artist from the 80s or 90s, the playlist would be mostly populated by artists from the same era as well! (as much as it could of course, there are a few newer one that got into the list)  I was very impressed with the result!

Now if only Genius works just like Pandora where you can have more than one seed per list…..

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3. iTunes Remote app
4. Tuesday’s Apple Event
5. Chinese music in iTunes Store

Tagged: Apple · iTunes · Music