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

Steve stood up yesterday and launched new iPod Nanos, a new iPod Touch, an updated iPod Classic and the new iTunes 8. I must admit, the Nano looks sweet, and I’ve downloaded iTunes, but nothing REALLY stands out. I do like the new Nano advert though!

What would I have liked to see? Apple TV 3.0 with Blu Ray 10″ MacBook Air with updated processor 30″ Apple Cinema screen with HDMI May be soon Want to accelerate your marketing and get better results?, need a professional photographer?, Free Online Marketing Course! Limited time only! Click now! Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Filed under: Audio, Multimedia, Rumors, iTunes On the heels of our earlier post about new features in iTunes 8 comes this post from video producer and designer Allan White, speculating that the new visualizer in iTunes might be Processing artist Robert Hodgin's amazing Magnetosphere, which was available up until a few months ago from The Barbarian Group (aka Robert's design company) as an iTunes plugin. As Allan points out, there are two very strong pieces of evidence for this: 1) Allan emailed Robert, who told him Magnetosphere had been sold to a "third party", and 2) a twitter from Digg founder (and amateur Apple rumor mill) Kevin Rose on Sept. 2nd describing the new visualizer as "planet like objects wrapping around each other w/stars/light streams". As you can see in the image above, this sounds like a pretty apt description of Magnetosphere, which visualizes sound as particle explosions like supernovas. The Barbarian Group website's page for Magnetosphere says that "We've had a ton of interest in it, and we've got some exciting plans, but it's gonna take us a couple months to make it all happen." Of course, nothing is confirmed, but it all points in the right direction. Personally, I'd love to see Magnetosphere on every iTunes user's screen, and not just because Robert is an amazing artist and also always gracious and helpful when I email him because my Processing particle system animations don't look as cool as his. The world just needs stuff this cool-looking everywhere.(Thanks to Poopie for noticing that I'd accidentally added an "s" to "Hodgin"!)[via Create Digital Music]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments