iTunes 8.0 (part 2)

Another day, another post.  The iTunes Genius’s analysis ended up taking about fifty minutes to run, with another ten or so of swapping data with the iTunes store. After that it all seems set to go.

One last setting adjustment: If you don’t want iTunes to open in a window (i.e. not full-screen) every time it starts, you’ll also need to right-click the iTunes icon you use to start it.  Either on the Desktop or the Start Menu – select Properties, and change the Run box from Normal Window to Maximised. Instant full-screen.

Couple of other things to note.  First, iTunes takes a lot longer to open now – I assume Genius playlists count as smart playlists, too many of which always slowed it down.  Its not bad, but there’s a noticable delay, perhaps a couple of seconds longer.  Its probably a good idea to leave the Genius panel closed unless you’re specifically using it, otherwise iTunes takes (comparitively) forever to get started and ready, like closing it on the iTunes Store window does.  Related, the time iTunes takes to respond to task switching when your working on something else has also slowed down, now and then there’s a noticable pause.  There was a slight stall once, and a couple of times a slight jitter.  This seemed to coincide with Firefox running flash-heavy webpages, something I’ve noticed is a problem on other, slower systems.  Itunes has always been a resource pig, and it looks like it just got worse.  The question is whether Genius, and reported better performace on larger libraries, makes it worth it.

Second, be aware there’s a couple more files to back up for the Genius playlists, iTunes Library Genius.itdb and iTunes Library Extras.itdb. They’re in the iTunes folder and clearly labelled, so you should catch them automatically if you’re just copying the whole folder.

On to the Genius.  Genius did okay.  The first track I tried, Claire Guerreso’s Matador, got no results.  The second, Uh Huh Her’s Say So, worked pretty well, a list of music from my library and some suggestions from the store.  Presumably Genius is more geared to mainstream music, and perhaps to the traditional boomer iTunes demographic, but it did okay here.  I wonder if the label makes a difference, if there’s a skew towards bigger labels (Uh Huh Her are on Nettwerk, and I think Guerreso might be unsigned – and presumably Genius, at the end of the day a sales tool, is better on tracks the iTunes store carries).  Playing around with some other tracks, Genius usually makes a list which have some connection, and although its not perhaps the one I’d be thinking of, I can see a connection between A and B.  Its not perfect, but its not meant to be.  Its a smarted-up party shuffle.  It gets past the most annoying aspect of shuffling – jarring transitions and randomness – pretty well, while preserving the best aspect of shuffling – randomness.  One interesting thing would be whether different stores give different or better results for people with multiple accounts.  Logically, if different stores have different patterns of use, and the US store is largest, that one might give better suggestions on more obscure artists.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Genius playlists, for now.  I won’t duplicate whole lists since half of the tracks are CDs and others are from the iTunes store, so I can’t do the usual links to labels and indie online stores.