To continue the post on iTunes 8...

Genius seems to put "Never gonna give you up" in more playlists than it should. Well played, Apple.

iTunes 8, pretty neat.

So I have of course upgraded to iTunes 8. So far I like it. That new visualizer looks pretty good, though I'm not really feeling that new album art song scrolling thing. It's neat, but I know I'll never use it.

I like Genius though. If you don't know what it is, it makes playlists for songs out of songs that go good with that song. It's neat. It also works on the iTunes store. If you open the Genius Sidebar, it recommends songs that you might like that go with whatever song you have highlighted in the song list. You can preview and buy them right there, and so far, I like Genius. Apparently instead of working by analyzing BPM and other such things regarding the song, it works via the internet. Genius keeps a database of all the music listened to by everyone who uses it. It keeps track of songs, ratings, plays, things like that. Then it somehow turns all that data into knowledge of which songs go with which other songs. It sounds like it wouldn't work at all, but I'm liking it so far. If I have it make me a playlist for a song I like and have it do 25 songs, 20 or more of them will probably be songs I won't skip, especially if I'm in a mood for songs that go with a song. For example, right now I'm listening to a playlist made from Rose Royce's Car Wash. It has a lot of Earth Wind & Fire songs as well as various others that I will listen to. I've also wanted various iTunes store recommendations that it's given me for various songs.

It's also got that visualizer, which I'm liking. It seems to change it's patterns, colors, and other things depending on the mood of the song playing. And that works pretty well.

Portable music player idiocy!

Recently out of boredom I've been answering questions on Yahoo! Answers and noticed quite a bit of portable music player idiocy in the category for portable music players. Since I don't feel like thinking of an intelligent way to word my complaints, I'll just make a list.

- The estimates that you get on how much music an MP3 player can hold are always right. Quite often when people ask questions like which size iPod or Zune would be best, people answer "well, this one can hold 20000 songs, so that will probably be OK maybe." What could possibly cause these people to not notice just how wrong those estimates are? You could argue that they don't understand things like encoders and bit rates, but what about song length? This was something I understood when I was 11 and browsing the Apple site, saying "Oh, those estimates don't make much sense. What about song length?" I didn't even know what a bit rate or an encoder was. It just makes sense.

- iPods and MP3 players are different things. ...What? I'll admit, Yahoo! Answers wasn't the first place I read this. But seriously, what? How the fuck are they different? Are iPods just so almighty and overly trendy that they now are classified as something other than an MP3 player? Yes, I know MP3 isn't even their regular format, but regardless, it plays MP3s, and MP3 player is the common name for "portable music player," hence why I stopped saying that. And don't get pissy if you're an Apple nazi because I said they're overly trendy. I own one, I love it, I love iPods, and they ARE overly trendy. This is fact, and anyone who isn't blind or stupid will tell you that.

- Not being able to figure out something that is so simple, the only way it could be easier would be to retardify it by taking away something important, like needing a computer to put songs on the MP3 player. This means all the people who ask us how to put songs on their iPods. How can you not know how to do that? It tells you in the manual to download iTunes if you don't have it, and just about the only thing you need to use iTunes is an IQ over 80. In fact, after you have it installed all you have to do is plug your iPod in and click "sync." I guess somehow these morons get it in their heads that the manual does not contain any useful information on using the product. But we all know that if we saved a few (continents of) forests by not packing manuals with consumer products, all the people who buy them would be calling in asking where the manual is. People are stupid.

- Not knowing how to put music into iTunes. Yeah, this one should've been in the above one, but I didn't want to cram it full of too many words. And also, you may have noticed that I talk about iPods and iTunes a lot. This is because they're what I have the most experience in, so questions pertaining to those things are the ones I usually click on. Anyway, there are questions like this more often than you'd think. Questions where people ask how to get music into iTunes. What the crap is that? How do you not get music into it? It pulls itself to the front of the screen when you put in a CD and even prompts you on whether or not you want to add it to your library. That's less common though, than people asking how to get music that's already on their computers into it. Apple tries as hard as they can to make it easy on these kinds of people and they still can't figure out how to get an MP3 they got on Limewire into iTunes. For those who don't know iTunes, you drag it. It's just that easy. You drag the song over to the library in iTunes and WHAMO. It's in iTunes. How do these people even figure out how to use Limewire? It's not like it's hard to use, but it's not nearly as user friendly as iTunes is.

And once a guy asked how to replace the battery on an iPod because it went through the washing machine. He somehow thought that the only part damaged was the battery. I'm sure it was damaged, but I have somehow gotten it in my head that even if he replaced it, it still wouldn't turn on. I dunno, it's just one of those feelings.