Genius!

I really didn't think I would find much use for the new "Genius" feature in iTunes 8. It seemed like a gimmick, and primarily to push more stuff from the iTunes store in my mind.

However, after playing with it for less than a night I'm pretty happy with it now. I was a bit concerned when my iTunes memory usage climbed to 800 MB while it was first compiling my genius information (and if you still care about privacy of your data it will disturb you as well). After that completed though, it was pretty cool seeing it group together songs from my library based on a given song.

After playing with that for a bit, I decided to turn on the sidebar and let it show songs from the store as well. The related songs portion is only mildly interesting to me -- what I really liked was the list of other songs I might be missing from that same artist.

It was while browsing an artist I happen to have nearly everything ever made, that I noticed something else that I found amusing. It claimed there was a song I didn't have, and that it was on an album that I physically own and had ripped to my library. After being thoroughly stumped for a bit (keep in mind it's the wee hours of the morning, and I have all sound muted), I realized that it was actually a hidden track. It turns out that if you buy the album from iTunes, the last song is broken into 2 separate songs, rather than one long track. Interesting. Also cool - because I now know the title to what was previously an untitled hidden track to me.