Filed under: iTS, iTunes, Mac 101The feature of iTunes 8 that Apple wants to you notice is called "Genius." Basically, it generates playlists, either from your songs or the iTunes Store, based upon a track selected from your library. In this post, we'll look at creating and saving a Genius playlist on your Mac.First, select the target track in your library. I wanted to generate a playlist for work, so I selected a mellow track by Band of Horses. Next, click the Genius button (with the icon) in the lower right-hand corner of the iTunes window. Presto! Your playlist is created. But there's still room for tweaking. At the top of the window, you'll see the track upon which your new playlist is based. Next to that, a drop-down menu lets you select the number of songs to include. Choose from 25, 50, 75 or 100.Finally, you can exclude an individual song by deselecting the gray checkbox next to its title. When you're happy with the result, click "Save Playlist" in the upper right-hand corner.Your new playlist will now appear with the others, named for the original target song.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

After the dust settled on Apple's "Let's Rock" event yesterday, it seemed as though the poor iPod classic was getting kicked to the curb—so to speak. However, Crave UK claims that Apple reps at the event told them that Genius playlists would come to the device via a free software upgrade. It's a glimmer of hope for classic fans who feel a bit gypped, but the source here seems sketchy, so I wouldn't don't take this rumor to the bank. [Crave UK]

iTunes 8, complete with fancy Genius Playlists and grid view, just went live via Apple Software Update and on Apple.com. Go grab it if you're interested, and let us know how the fancy playlists work out for you. Hit the jump for our initial impressions and a gallery of screenshots. First impression: this thing takes FOREVER to install and requires a restart. I want those 20 minutes of my life back, Apple. This is a media player for god's sake. Second impression: it's eating all of my system resources going through my 120GB of music for Genius Playlists. This had better be worth it. It's using over 300MB of my system memory and it appears that it's going to take a good hour to handle this. You've been warned. Grid view is pretty useless as far as I'm concerned. It makes sorting through your music collection next to impossible if it's even sort of large, and when you click an album to play it you can't see the album's tracklist. Couple that with the fact that half my albums don't have art attached and you have a feature I'm guaranteed to never use. The new visualizer is AWESOME. I love it. Is this a bug? The icon that goes next to whatever song is playing in list view doesn't seem to appear anymore. If I'm looking at a list of songs, the only way to see which is playing is to look at the top window and then find that title in the list. That's no good. Nevermind, it's back now. Not sure what the hell was going on there. Update: about 40% into this Genius business. It's sloooowwwww. [Apple]