Sometimes Apple still manages to surprise me (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach
I've been using Apple computers and software for almost five years now. Since then the OS X operating systems has gone through a lot of changes, becoming nicer and nicer along the way. All kinds of nifty features were added, most of them without becoming bloatware. The fact that I've seen five years of this stuff has had its effect though and I find it hard to become enthused by most of the new stuff. It's great and all, but you won't catch me dancing down the street.
But sometimes, sometimes a little nugget of gold comes out of Apple and I'm completely in love with their software again.
Case in point: the Genius function that was added to iTunes recently and the Remote application for the iPhone.
Genius will take any song in your library and, given a few circumstances, will create a new playlist containing 25 songs that ought to go nicely with the selected song. This selection of tunes is based on data gathered from the iTunes libraries from thousands of users world wide. This doesn't work out perfectly each time, but usually it gives me great results.
Let's say that I pick the Beastie Boys' Sabotage. iTunes will almost instantaneously suggest songs that go with it. In this case I got (among others):
* Wu-Tang Clan, Gravelpit
* Black Eyed Peas, Pump it
* Outkast, Roses
And so on. I reckon that the quality of iTunes' selection depends wholly on the amount of songs you have from a given genre. I can imagine that a Genius playlist for German Schlager music would be quite impossible on my computer ^_^; The great thing about all of this though, is the fact that I am constantly re-discovering songs that I'd even forgotten I had!
Combine this with the Remote application which runs on my iPhone and I can have a very nice evening on the couch. Using the app I can control all of iTunes' operations without ever touching my Mac. And because I'm re-discovering music I can immediately assign rankings to these "new" songs, or just skip past them if I really hate them.
Posted in: apple , genius , iphone , itunes , remote