iTunes 8 looks nice, is a touch shy of brilliant

Yesterday Steve Jobs continued his quest to take over the music world by releasing iTunes 8. The new version is at its core the same, but two new features have me geeking out a bit.

First is the new grid view, where you can look at your music library as a grid with album covers, similar to the CoverFlow that came out in iTunes 7, but on a bit larger scale. There's little real advantage in this, other than the fact that it looks mighty cool and you can scroll through your artists much easier than you could before, and once you've gone past the initial grid view, it breaks down your songs by album. iTunes is nothing if not tidy.

The far more geeky new feature on iTunes 8 is its Genius software. iTunes Genius will take a song in your library and, based on what else is in your library and what other iTunes users (at least those who have also enabled the Genius), will form a playlist centered around that track. It then offers recommendations of songs you could purchase that would fit into this playlist (mostly just popular tracks from the artists already in the playlist). For example, putting "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters into the Genius yields a pretty straightforward playlist of 90s alternative (Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Fuel, etc.). Likewise, using "Poprocks and Coke" by Green Day begats a list of blink-182, Sum 41, The Offspring, and all manner of other punk acts. It's a pretty cool feature and handy for someone with musical ADD like myself, but its not without limitations. It can only use stuff that appears in the iTunes Store (so no Beatles will ever show up in the Genius list), and its a bit predictable in its choices, so playlists can get bland. Obviously this works best when a) you have lots of music in your library, and b) lots of people enable the Genius. Given the amount of restraint I've heard when people talk about this function (apparently people are reluctant to tell Apple what they're listening to), it may not be everything Apple hoped it would be. But if you're too lazy to come up with your own playlists, by all means let Apple try to do it for you.

Foo Fighters - Everlong [iTunes]
Green Day - Poprocks and Coke [iTunes]

==TJ==