How does "genius" on iTunes actually work?

[Catastrophe.]

Most of my songs on my iTunes are ripps from CDs, I think I've bought 2 albums and 3 singles off iTunes all together. I just don't understand how it knows how some songs are "pop" "rock" "punk" when they aren't even on the iTunes store and are quite obscure :|

[MisterMe]

So you think that you know more about music that the people who work for the iTunes Musics Store at Apple?

[Catastrophe.]

Where did I say that? All I asked was how can it determine what genre a song is.

[aliacid]

Originally Posted by MisterMe

So you think that you know more about music that the people who work for the iTunes Musics Store at Apple?

Was that really necessary? I'll answer that one for you, no! Where did she imply that she knows more about music than the people who work for Apple? She was asking how Genius is able to ascertain the genre of a track, what's the problem with that?

[brayhite]

My guess is crowd-sourced information, similar to how Last.fm tags their tracks. If it's not in their catalogue already, they find similar artists based on other listeners' song patterns and interests and select them that way.

It may just be me, but it does do a rather good job of picking not just related artists/genres, but even music arrangement (heavy bass or screaming chorus) and lyrical content.

Or maybe I've just been spoiled with my Genius selections ha. It is rather questionable at times, as well (goes from Cat Stevens to Regina Spektor? I can kinda see that.. kinda).

[ratzzo]

It follows a criteria to match songs to the one you selected. This criteria include language (spanish songs usually yield other spanish songs), match pop with pop, rock with rock, most of the time if you have more than one track on that artist selected, it will also appear on the generated Genius list, and so on.

These are all assumptions. Remember Apple syncs your library against theirs when you choose to enable Genius and assigns each track other similar ones in your iTunes library. I think they just have huge lists of genius-like songs in their servers which they match with what you got.

[Catastrophe.]

Thanks guys I've been wondering this for a while

[alpis]

it indeed collects information from all libraries of all users of genius: which songs are listened to and in which order...

further information her: http://www.technologyreview.com/view...-really-works/