I’ve quite enjoyed playing with the new Genius playlist feature in iTunes 8.0, but found out yesterday that it makes some interesting choices when it’s limited by the subset of music I have on my 8GB iPod touch.
(To make sense of this for my mom and others who might read this who have no idea what the Genius playlist is – basically you give it one song, and it generates a playlist of “similar” songs from whatever you have on your iPod. It works really well with my full music library.)
Case in point: I asked it to generate a 25-song playlist based on Simon and Garfunkel’s classic Mrs. Robinson.
Near the middle of the playlist: John Williams’ Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back.
I don’t even wanna know how it made that leap. (Well, I sorta do…. but not really… but yeah.)
It’s pretty obvious… Art Garfunkel is a Sith Lord.
have you ever tried pandora radio? it kind of does the same thing with their own database of music…i enjoy it. it lets you explore all types of music…i’m listening to it right now actually…
Heather, yeah, I’m quite familiar with Pandora. I listen to it on a semi-frequent basis. It was fun to see iTunes come up with similar playlists out of my own music. Of course, when it’s just my own music, I don’t get any recommendations of new stuff to buy… on the other hand, that might be a good thing for my budget.
I love it, too. Sadly, my bootlegs at home make it fairly useless.
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[...] mentioned before that I’m enjoying the iPod’s new Genius playlist. I hit on a really good one [...]