I had resisted installing the Genius function in iTunes since it had first come out. The idea of sending all my metadata over to Cupertino seemed to be a lot more for their benefit than mine (a mountain of business intelligence – like the fact that I buy most of my mp3s from Amazon now).
Last week a co-worker had it installed and I saw the 9 lists it generates from within iTunes and thought I should test it out. In short – it’s a killer app. More powerful than the lists generated in the client, is the added functionality on the iPod. You pick any song while it’s in the list, hold down the center button and fire up the genius. It then generates a playlist based on that track.
Unlike anything that I’ve seen like this before, it does an excellent job of digging deep in the archives and matching similar stuff. It creates a groove as good as the average DJ can, plus it has the added bonus of total recall – it remembers the details from every track on every album. Many times the Genius pulled tracks from albums that I hadn’t heard – usually ones that had one huge hit, but Genius will find other great tracks you may have overlooked.
Now that you have your mix, go upgrade your headphones.