Intelligence not required

I updated to iTunes 8.0 last night. One of the most touted features was the Genius thing. The premise is awesome. If you are familiar with Pandora then you already know of it.

Basically iTunes analyzes your music collection and allows you to create on the fly playlists based on specific songs. The program is supposed to select other songs that are similar to the one you selected in various ways.

Awesome right?

Well, it would be, if the program were intelligent enough to manage. Unfortunately, however, I find the lack of intelligence in anything called GENIUS disturbing.

I can expect that it is going to be unaware of some of the stuff in my collection, such as Xampha, Sefiros, etc... but when it doesn't manage to recognize any of the Stravinski in there, I get worried. I suppose my biggest complaint is when it says that it doesn't recognize (about 75% of my 11,000-ish songs) but has no problem prompting me to purchase the tracks I am missing from that artist.

Seriously, wtf? It apparently knows enough about Infected mushroom to try to sell me more music, but doesn't know enough about it to pick 24 other songs that are similar?

Ahh, when it DOES recognize a song though, this should be a wonderous journey through my eclectic collection of tracks from hundreds of artists right? I wouldn't know, it seemed to match toad the wet sproket and guns n' roses with everything I selected. With the exception of Jars of Clay, no Toad the Wet Sprocket... huh? If you know anything about these two bands you know that they are very similar. In fact, Toad was a HUGE inspiration for Jars of Clay musically.

I just don't get it.

Apple has said that the Genius system will get a lot better with age, as people use it. I suppose that this makes a good level of sense. I am, however, wondering if Apple seriously expects us to just sit through horrible reccomendation while they figure it out.

I don't think I am going to give it that much space. I've started using floola to manage my iPod, so iTunes barely gets loaded anymore. In fact, I only even loaded it in order to get the update.

I suppose I could have saved that bandwidth for something useful.