iTunes Genius Review

So Apple has released a new iTunes program called Genius. Basically, what it does is you can tell it a song you like, and it will find other songs like it. It seems to have a lot of potential, but it comes with a few flaws. Now, I haven't been using it for that long, so some problems may not of been discovered yet.

First things first, to use it, you first must let it access and send Apple your library information. This not only bugged me from a privacy point of view, but took forever. I have approximately 7000 songs (30 gbs) in my library, and Genius went through everyone, which took about 15-20 of painfully computer lagging minutes. It then uploads it to one of Apple's mysterious servers for analysis. At this point, it got a little fuzzy to what happend, because I assumed that Apple recognize certin songs and other songs like it and sends that info to your computer, but I'm still not sure. For all I know, this could just be a big scam by Apple to keep a eye on it's users (I wouldn't be surprised).

As for the privacy part of it, it kind of fails at life. It explains (and quite a lot) that it will perioticly upload your library to the server to keep Genius up to date, but only while Genius is enabled. If you would like to keep your library a secret from prying eyes, you can disable it. Although I'm not sure whats keeping Apple from just looking in anyways.

After getting it set up, and fixing a few problems of my own (a while back, iTunes crashed on me and I lost a lot of songs, and had to re-add them), I enabled it and set it up. It took a little while to find a song that it would work with. I went through at least 3 'till I found one that it could use, and it was odd, because they where big name bands (You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC, Walk This Way by Aerosmith just to name two.) After it found a song that it liked, it imedetly found 25 other songs like it, and it was fairly accurete. I tryied a few type of songs and genres (Emo, Rock, 70's, etc.) and it always found songs along those guide lines.

I think with a little polishing, and a disregard for your privacy, this could turn into a very useful app. All in all, if you have a lot of songs on your computer that you haven't listen too, or even know exist, this is a great way to discover new music. (6/10)


Link to Apple's Genius site-
http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatsnew/


NOTE- This is only a review for the Genius on the PC, not the iPod version.