iTunes Genius: Rejected from Mensa
September 13th, 2008
A human would never make this mistake:
I initially suspected this happened because the MP3s from Amazon have “(Album Version)” in their titles while the titles in the iTunes store do not.
Simple Test
To confirm my suspicion, I renamed the tracks to match the titles in the iTunes store. Unfortunately, Genius still provides the same “Top Songs You’re Missing”, so I think this flaw goes beyond simple title matching.
I find this odd because iTunes is able to automatically locate the album art. Perhaps some of the intelligence behind the album art locator needs to work its way into the Genius sidebar.
On a more important topic, what do you think of the new Metallica album?
“A human would never make this mistake:”
On the other hand having a human taking care of finding new songs to listen to according to your itunes library may be a bit …
Well costly.
It may have flaws but i already enjoy using it a lot!
I believe the Genius feature downloads the data about your library to disk, and changing names will not be sufficient to change the data. Once you’ve changed the names, got to Store > Update Genius, and then see if this changes your results.
@Daniel I was really hoping that would work…I tried what you suggested, but Genius still tells me a long list of songs I’m “missing” but really have.
To be fair, my results usually have one or two tracks I already have, though not as many as your shot above.
What makes this worse is that the suggestions are from different albums or live versions. Yet when you investigate for duplicated songs in your library it pulls up album and live versions (with live versions in my library having “(Live)” after them and also marked with the genre “Live”) as the being the same. A little contradictory I think!
Actual intelligent matching on tracks wouldn’t ever trick dumb users into purchasing tracks multiple times. “OMG I’m missing the OTHER version!? Buy Buy buY!!!!” If I designed Genius I would have probably allowed for optional matching via musicbrainz hash. It takes a lot of processing to generate the hash for each file but once it’s generated it can be reused.
The actual mistake was probably in buying Death Magnetic (a.k.a. St. Anger Vol. II) in the first place.
But to stay on-topic, do you find Genius to be useful at all? Is this just one really bad example from a tool that generally works pretty well?
Sounds like “genius” needs a dunce cap.
Same thing was happening to me.
HERE IS HOW YOU FIX IT:
1. Select all the music in your library… Right click (if you’re a mac I don’t know what the hell you do) and select “convert ID3 tags”
2. Click the Reverse Unicode button
3. Under Store click the update genius option.
Problem solved
Guess, iTunes does some tracj audio analysis and searches for songs with similar footprints. So, get the same song in album and live album versions and voila – you got the other one recommended.