Re: iTunes 8 Genius (?)

In article <120920081715548409%dogbreath@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, sbt
<dogbreath@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article
<5pOdnf9A7Ja7SlfVnZ2dnUVZ_srinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Jim
Higgins <gordian238@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jolly Roger wrote:
In article
<fJKdneVAN-PWKVfVnZ2dnUVZ_hadnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jim Higgins <gordian238@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

FWIW Genius is "unavailable" for every song in my music library. It
will not make any playlists.

Are your songs ripped from CDs you own, purchased from the iTunes music
store, or did you download them from various sundry sources on the net?
Also, are the songs tagged with the correct ID3 tags to identify the
artist, album, song name, and so on?


Total number of files: 1805

Sources: mixed-purchased from iTunes, imported into iTunes from CDs,
some audio MP3s and waves.

The library lists artist, album song, etc. for the music purchased from
iTunes or imported from CDs so I assume that the tag info is there.

I was trying Genius on music purchased from iTunes or imported from CDs
and there was not a single one that did not say "Genius unavailable". I
didn't try every one (iTunes or CD import) but tried about 60+ and gave
up. Purchase recommendations did show up but no Genius playlist were
produced. Perhaps Apple's central database does not yet have enough input?

To quote from Apple's Web site re Genius Playlists:

Genius Playlists

Meet Genius: a brilliant way to create perfect playlists. Play a song,
click the Genius button, and iTunes creates a playlist of other songs
from your library that go great together. Genius playlists help you
discover songs in your library you never knew you had ? and rediscover
forgotten favorites.

Nowhere in this description nor in the popup of "How Genius Works" that
accompanies it is there any mention of a central database being
required nor an Internet connection, which might imply database access.

My experience is that a connection wasn't required, because it did find
a few "matches" for some of my songs on the Toshiba laptop (all my
Internet activity is done on the Mac, I don't let my Toshiba anywhere
near the net -- it's just way more effort than I'm willing to expend to
keep a Windows machine "clean"). The fact that it did find a few is not
a suggestion that I think the "Genius" is any smarter than a low-grade
imbecile as it missed a number of obviously similar songs and a couple
of its suggestions were "off the wall."

The Toshiba laptop had to be connected to the Internet at one point to
activate the Genius feature in the first place. You cannot use Genius
until iTunes has uploaded your library to Apple and downloaded the
similarity data, and you are informed that your library is being sent
to Apple at the time. After iTunes has downloaded the data from Apple,
it might not need the Internet connection to make playlists; I haven't
tried that.

--
Jerry Kindall, Seattle, WA <http://www.jerrykindall.com/>

Send only plain text messages under 32K to the Reply-To address.
This mailbox is filtered aggressively to thwart spam and viruses.
.

Loading