Just started using the Genius feature on iTunes. Wow!
Feel like an idiot for it taking so long for me to start using it, but life has been pretty full of late, what with looking for work, building a new rifle, taking care of horses and planning for a Christmas vacation.
In any event, I'm on it now. I'm a huge Massive Attack fan, and tried out the feature tonight. With 19-odd Gb of music on my laptop (as much as I can jam on the weenie 100Gb disk) it found a really good track by Everything But the Girl that I didn't know I had.
So I go to iTunes to do a little research and find that they had a collaboration with Massive on the album Protection (the lead singer Tracey Thorne did the vocals). I'm very good with voices and knew that I had heard her voice before.
In principle, doing something like Genius is not too difficult. Just build a very large database and have some good algorithms for scoring tracks. But jeez, in execution? It would seem like it would take a hell of a lot of work to make it work as well as it does.
I'm consistently amazed that Apple makes cool technology with such ease. They have got a bunch of smart, driven people down there in Cupertino.
Posted by artandscience at December 18, 2008 09:28 PM