iTunes 8 Wants to be the Genius of Your Music Collection

The kickoff of Apple's iTunes 8 today marked some interesting new milestones and features for the software long associated with loading audio and video files onto your iPod or iPhone. The software is, as always, available for free download directly from Apple.

The biggest noted change in iTunes 8 is the new Genius feature, which Apple says "automatically create playlists from songs in your music library that go great together—with just one click...[it]helps music fans rediscover favorite songs in their existing music library and suggests related music on their Tunes Store they might want to add to their music collection."

What this means in practical terms is that you select a song in your library, activate the Genius feature and iTunes will create a playlist of songs for you. This playlist is generated based upon "information about your music library [that] is anonymously sent to the iTunes Store, where it is combined with the anonymously-gathered knowledge from millions of other iTunes users and processed through Apple-developed algorithms." The results generated are sent back to your iTunes, tailored to your music library.

The Genius feature will put into iTunes a sidebar, which "recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don’t already have, based on the songs you select." In addition to this, Apple has also tweaked the browsing interface, displaying your music and video libraries using your album and video covers.

(Note: Product mentions on the Portable Electronics blog do not certify endorsement of the product, but rather provide details on new products which might be of interest to consumers.)

(Photo Credit: Apple)