iTunes Genius Mix Is A Genius Radio Station

Posted by buzz
 

Apple finally added a radio to the iPod line today. You can find it in the iPod Nano, but will anyone use it?
Already the iPod has shown it’s muscle to be the ultimate personalized radio station. It has spent the past few years burning into our consciousness a way to organize our music in playlists just the way we used to make mix tapes.
Up until recently we had to do the sorting, but now with the iTunes Genius, Apple is helping us clean up the mess and get everything neat and tidy. The Genius will analyze your playlist, help sort them and even suggest other songs you’d like based on your preferences.
With the iTunes 9 upgrade today, another giant leap was made in managing your music and despite a radio being dropped in the Nano, I wonder if anyone will ever need one again.
Yes, radio wins on personality (although some may argue penny pinching is squeezing the talent out of the booth), but when it comes to music can a music director ever catch up to the one click I just performed and was given this gift?

iTunes Genius just instantly catalogued the thousands of songs in my folders and arranged them by tempo, genre, pace, era etc. It instantly created a dozen different themed radio stations based on the music I already love.
12 different radio stations and I love each one of them.
How many radio stations are on your presets? How many do you love?
I’d like to see a radio station take their catalog and dump it into the iTunes Genius to see what kind of mixes and suggestions it would come up with.. perhaps it would come up with something we could all be passionate about.
The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

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Is the limit for the number of mixes stuck at 12? 

Source 

Steve Jobs on Amazon and Ice Cream

SEPTEMBER 9, 2009, 6:18 PM

 

By DAVID POGUE

Jeff Chiu/Associated Press Steve Jobs at an Apple music event on Wednesday.

Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, discussed his health and Apple’s new product line in an interview Wednesday with David Pogue, the personal technology columnist for The New York Times. Context has been added to the original quotes posted here.


Wednesday in San Francisco, I attended Apple’s annual iPod Show, its holiday-season kickoff of new iPods and iTunes Store developments.
I’ll have a look at what’s new in a post on Pogue’s Posts on Thursday. But Wednesday, I had the chance to chat with Steve Jobs after the event.
I asked him, first of all, what the blogosphere’s been buzzing about: why Apple put a video camera into the tiny iPod Nano—and not the iPod Touch.
Mr. Jobs reiterated what Phil Schiller, the marketing vice president, had said earlier in the onstage presentation: that Apple is really pitching the iPod Touch as a game machine these days. And to do that, you have to make it as inexpensive as possible.
“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine,” he said. “We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.”
I also asked him why the Nano can record video, but can’t snap still photos. That reason, he said, is technical: the sensors you need to record video are extremely thin these days—thin enough to fit into the wafer-thin Nano. But the ones with enough resolution for stills, especially with autofocus (like the sensor in the iPhone), are much too thick to cram into a player that’s only .02 inches thick.
A couple of years ago, pre-Kindle, Mr. Jobs expressed his doubts that e-readers were ready for prime time. So today, I asked if his opinions have changed.
“I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing,” he said. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”
He said that Apple doesn’t see e-books as a big market at this point, and pointed out that Amazon.com, for example, doesn’t ever say how many Kindles it sells. “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”
The products that Apple revealed today have been in the works for a while—since before Mr. Jobs’s health-related hiatus from running Apple. I wondered: since he was gone for several months, will we see a several-month gap in the new products coming out of Apple? “There are some things that I’m focusing a lot of attention on right now—to polish,” he said. “No, I don’t think we’re going to miss a beat. We have some really good stuff coming up.”
Finally, as I left, I asked him how he’s feeling these days—another question on everybody’s mind. “I probably need to gain about 30 pounds, but I feel really good. I’m eating like crazy. A lot of ice cream,” he said with a chuckle.


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I've seen Steve Job's pictures during the Apple event and he really does look a bit on the thin side.

Download iTunes 9

For those wanting to try out the new features (Genius DJ, App management, etc), get your iTunes 9 now! Apple has updated their download page and the button now links correctly to the correct file.

Official Link: http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/