If you haven’t heard today’s news from Apple, your missing out on something. Besides the new iPod refreshes including the awesome new iPod Nano, they released iTunes 8. The new Nano is awesome and everything, but the news i was excited about was this new release of iTunes. iTunes has grown to be a big part of my Mac experience over the short years, and now it’s gotten even better.

With this new full release, instead of another 7 point something release, Apple brings a few great things to the table. The first thing i want to get into is called Genius.

Genius, is a new feature built into iTunes 8 used for automatically creating playlists with songs that will go perfectly together. Here is what happens. When you select a song you really like, and you would like to throw it in a playlist with a bunch of other random songs it would go perfectly with, you just highlight the song you like, and click the Genius button at the bottom right of the window. Right from there, you will instantly have a playlist full of songs that are similar to the song you selected. Chances are, you will love the playlist they make for you. You can save the playlist or refresh it to generate different songs.

I’ve started using Genius a lot, and i love it. It’s made my iTunes experience a million times better. I can’t stand shuffling, and i don’t like looking around forever trying to find songs to throw in a playlist manually. 2 clicks is all it takes to make me a playlist of up to 100 songs that i will love.

The second thing i would like to just touch on, is the fact that they have brought the visualizer back, and added different styles of visuals to it. They are actually pretty cool.

So go ahead and download iTunes 8, and enjoy Genius!