Hands-on with iTunes 8 Genius: Einstein with dementia?

Trying to create a playlist of music based on any track from Shakira's 1998 album Dónde Están los Ladrones? resulted in an error message. This is probably a teething issue, but it's not as if Shakira's a niche selection, is it?

Moving on from this, we succeeded at deliberately confusing Genius. We took as our source track a song by the modern Italian composer Luciano Berio. His 1965 track Sequenza III For Woman's Voice involved giving a trained female opera singer music written not with musical notes, but with squiggles, random words, giggles and screams, all written on musical manuscript paper.

It's an incredibly interesting piece of music (although it actually contains no music other than one female voice), but one that the iTunes Genius failed to suggest compatible songs for. So if you like bizarre, experimental modern operatics, expect to experience a rather stupid Genius.

We'll be keeping regular checks on how well Genius performs as more people use it. But for now it's being marked as useful, intuitive and fun, but understandably underwhelming for anyone who doesn't have much music, or who has lots of music from only a small selection of genres or styles.

Try it yourself by downloading it for free from Apple.com. -Nate Lanxon

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