Recently, other then the iPhone Apple hasn’t really been impressing me with updates to their products. But the new iTunes really turns me on for a few reasons.

The Genius Playlist

Lets say you finally pick a song that fits the mood for whatever you are doing, you pick a upbeat song for a party, or some downtempo stuff for late night internet browsing, now all you have to do is press the magic genius button and iTunes will generate a playlist with similar songs from your own iTunes music library.

For instance I start listening to Bjork’s track ‘Hidden Place’ and want to continue to the mood, so I click the genius button and iTunes creates a playlist filled with tracks from Air, Portishead, LCD Soundsystem, Goldfrapp, even Shpongle. Now I would never sit down and listen to a Shpongle album these days, but somehow iTunes finds the song of a Shpongle album that is similar to ‘Hidden Place’ that works really well in the context of the new playlist.

For people with large music collections this new feature allows you to rediscover music you already have on your computer that you may have overlooked. I already like it much better then Pandora which has never really helped me to find anything new.

Beware: iTunes accomplishes this magic by reading and storing the details of your music library. Also, this features only works with tracks that are on the iTunes music store, so if you want to test what else sounds like some Garageband track you made it won’t work.

Grid View - Ripping Off Cover Buddy

Grid View

iTunes also added another view setting called grid, that is more or less a rip off of a number of 3rd party plug-ins that have existed for iTunes for a while, like Cover Buddy. Lesson #1 never make a plug in for an Apple product because they will steal it and make it better by the mere fact that it integrates cohesively into Steve Jobs worldview. Remember, Apple is interested in creating a world for you, rather then allowing you to create a world with it.

Just like with cover flow I tried to getting into using it but kept switching back to the normal list view, because its just more functional. I actually wonder how many people out there use coverflow and grid view. The idea of having the visually stunning artwork of the album covers displayed while listening to your music is definitely attractive, but not always that functional.

My favorite view

It is not like when I play music I just want to sit there and look at the album art. I am usually doing things on the internet or working in some other application. I usually just have iTunes running in the background. And if I ever want to have a visual I will just turn on the visualizer. I think that the coverflow and grid view work much better on the iPod because its only function is to play music.

With that being said I think the best set-up is the list view with the album work as a small thumbnail on the side. This gives the cohesive feel of the album while not taking up too much space.

The New Visualizer

The New iTunes Visualizer

The choices of Visualizers for iTunes has always been lacking. Clearly no one out there takes serious the art of the visualizer. This new one looks really pretty and slick but it doesn’t really grip to the music like the classic one does.

Because this new visualizer is so crappy it is inspiring me to learn how to build my own visualizer. So as I investigate that I will post my finding and hopefully make it easier for others to program their own visualizer, this could wind up to be very difficult but I shall explore anyways.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Music, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.