Mostly bad, but the shiny effect keeps me coming back for more:

• I don’t like the new album cover view. Thumbs down, mainly because I have almost no cover art. iTunes, why don’t you just download the cover art for me? Actually, didn’t I already do this once? And I really don’t like that view with my podcasts.
• Ugh, the Genius feature. Really? I have to send my entire music library to Apple? Here you go $MAJOR_CORPORATION, have some more of my $PRIVATE_DATA. Apple, I hate you so much for proving me wrong; you are like every other god damn soul-less corporate monster on the planet. (I once got into an argument with a friend about iTunes and the iPod and he was like “DRM! Linux! Restrictive AAC licensing!” and I was like “Podcasts! The iPod is easy to use! I never buy anything from the Apple Store! iTunes doesn’t send any of your personal data back to Apple!” Yeah, my bad.)
• Now that I’ve sold my soul for something shiny, I have to say that I like Genius playlists. Mostly. I am rather sorry that it doesn’t seem to be take BPM or anything like that into account. I did a playlist starting from a fast-paced Bela Fleck song and the very next song in the playlist was a super slow John Coltrane number. All it’s doing is number crunching on everyone’s library and everyone’s ratings. Meh. But I’ve gotten a few interesting mixes so far.
• Not too happy with the Genius sidebar though. First off, it took a half an hour to find out how to enable the sidebar once I disabled it. There’s no “enable Genius sidebar” menu item, it’s a fricking button at the bottom of the screen? I never look down there. Yes I know the Genius playlist generator button is down there but there’s nothing about that generic backwards play button that screams “Open a sidebar that connects me directly to the iTunes music store so you can suck yet more money out of me you bastards.” Also, all of the purchasing chrome takes up a lot of real estate and looks tacky.
• Genius doesn’t always recognize the songs in my music library. For instance, when I try to make a playlist out of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by Daft Punk, it pops up a little dialog helpfully explaining that Genius is unavailable for this song because iTunes cannot identify it. But I bought that song on iTunes! I cannot be the first person in the world to buy this song on iTunes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.