Apple‘s CEO Steve Jobs just announced that the new, 4G iPod nano as well as the new iPod touch will both have the ability to display (while playing a track) other tracks on the currently playing album, other tracks by the current artist, or to make a “Genius playlist.” This functionality sounds useful, and while I realize many, many people have thought about similar things, it does remind me of my post from June of last year, where I suggested building functionality akin to TiVo‘s swivel search feature into the iPod.
What I wonder about, given the above, is how the data necessary to generate a “Genius” playlist are stored on your iPod. I guess Apple plans to generate IDs for every track, and then using their whizbang mathematicians, build a matrix relating all of the IDs to one another, and that makes perfect sense to me on the desktop, but it seems like a lot of data to carry over to the iPod itself. Once this is in the wild, I really hope some clever person rummages around on their iPod and opens up the file that stores all of that information.
Quod Ero Spero 