Modern mixtape and playlist addicts have received a few gifts from the music gods in the past weeks with the addition of Genius to iTunes and with streaming music site Favtape getting a major facelift. Genius, like streaming music site Pandora, creates playlists based on similarites between songs.
Genius will likely be a huge cash cow for iTunes, in addition, it adds links to songs you can buy from the iTunes store, as you can see in the sidebar in my screen cap above. And lest you think this is only available on your computer, you can also create Genius playlists from your iPhone or iPod Touch, provided you've updated the software on either of those devices.
Once in a while, Genius won't be able to make a playlist for you. Apple says this may be because you don't have enough songs in your library. This may also happen if the song wasn't aqcuired through legal means and iTunes doesn't have enough information (in this case, I recommend actually filling out the information for your songs.). Just remember, the more you use Genius, the smarter it'll become, and the playlists it makes for you will just get better and better.
Favtape, which we covered at Bitchbuzz in our piece on Muxtape alternatives, previously just a Pandora and Last.fm mashup has now turned into a full fledged streaming playlist creator. Instead of uploading the songs from your personal collection (which should be noted is likely what got muxtape in trouble with the RIAA as they were hosting so much free music), Favtape searches the web for streaming files that already exist.
You can mix your own "favtapes" and you can even make tapes of just one artist, like this one I made for Hot Chip. And of course, you can still create playlists of your favorite last.fm or Pandora songs.
While you will never catch me giving a Genius created playlist as a gift for a boy I'm trying to woo (I am a mix tape ,purist, after all), both of these tools should satisfy any music lover's need for variety, or at the very least, need to create a party playlist in the next 5 minutes.