Genius

I'm not always an early adopter of technology - which in many cases is a good thing, so I'm just finding out about the "Genius Toolbar" in iTunes 8. Pretty freaking cool. The Genius scans your iTunes library (takes a while but I'm at work so who cares???) Then when you play a song you can click the "genius button" and iTunes spits out a play list of similar songs.

I tried it first with "Caring is Creepy" from the Shins, one of my favorite songs, and it spit out a mix of Travis, Coldplay, Gomez, Guster, Pete Yorn etc... very cool. Then I tried a Sonic Flood song and I got a mix of Jenn Knapp, David Crowder etc... also very cool. Then I broke it - for some reason it doesn't know who Subset is (dream band of Sir Mix alot and Presidents of the U.S.) - tried a few other obscure/random songs and got similar results. The lesson here is if it's not available on iTunes, or if it's a MP3 you got from a friend with no title/artist info you aren't going to be very genius.

Thanks Apple for a cool tool, and thanks for wasting a billable hour this morning!