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Genius not available for songs

Whenever I click the Genius button for any song added to my iTunes in the last six months, I get the message that Genius is not available for that song. These are all songs that I've purchased from ITunes, and I have updated Genius several times.

Genius will still create a playlist based on an old songs in my iTunes, but it seems to not work for anything recently downloaded (i.e., within the last six months). Is this a known bug or is there a fix?

I moved my iTunes library to an external drive last year - I"m not sure if that might have anything to do with it.

Mac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Jan 31, 2011 9:34 AM

Reply
56 replies

Feb 28, 2014 4:23 PM in response to JoannKB11

Wanted to share what I have learned (not too much!). I have been having the same problem, with *many* songs, including those from CDs, those purchased from iTunes, and even those I have previously used to create Genius Playlists. I contacted Apple, and eventually dealt with a supervisor. We have done a lot of stuff, including restoring my phone from a backup. Same problem. The engineer she spoke with suggested I "choose another song," which is preposterous, because so many are not working (including The Rolling Stones, which I have about 25 other Stones songs alone as matches). The engineer sent the problem to the "iTunes engineers," and I am supposed to hear back next week. I have over 1300 songs, and probably 1/4 of them do not generate any matches. Sometimes they are even on the same Greatest Hits CD as other songs that *do* have matches. Sent a screen shot to my Apple person for her to send along: it's a Genius Playlist I made from the song "Late in the Evening" (which will no longer generate a playlist); it's labelled by the song title, and the song is missing from its own playlist because Genius no longer thinks it has any Genius matches. Ridiculous.

Apr 6, 2014 3:55 PM in response to JoannKB11

Good news! Today, I went into my iTunes just to listen to some music. I tried creating a genius playlist for "dreams & nightmares" by Meek Mill, a song from 2012. I was expecting to see "genius can not create a playlist for the selected song", but to my surprise, it worked! It worked for most songs that it had before refused to work for. It even worked for songs released this year! There are still a few songs that don't work. For example, Juicy J's Stay Trippy album. Most of the songs worked, but a few still didn't work. I should also mention that the songs that didn't work were the ones that had a featured artest. I am now going to take the songs with featured artests, and get rid of them. For example, "Juicy J Feat. Lil Wayne & 2 Chainz" will simply become just "Juicy J." Most of the songs I changed worked! Except for "birthday song" by 2 Chainz. Also, the entire "Kaleidoscope Dream" album by Miguel won't create genius playlists. Interssting!

Apr 7, 2014 10:25 AM in response to Walter Kilbourne

I am so, so glad you posted this. I checked after the lastest update, which had "bug fixes," but it was still not working then. And, I have not heard anything from the woman working on my case with Apple. I opened iTunes, updated Genius, crossed my fingers, and all my broken songs were fixed. That is, the ones that *used to* make Genius playlists, then didn't, now do again. To get them to work on my iPhone, I then had to sync my phone to the computer. Maybe there is another way to update Genius in the phone, but that's what I did. Before the sync, nada. After the sync, perfection. It even fixed the playlist made from a song that later had stopped working. Thank you so much for posting, or I might never have known!

Jul 19, 2014 7:58 AM in response to Ricardo Gurgel

The solution on this page worked for me

http://deeemm.com/m-tutorials/36-mac-how-tos/196-fix-itunes-genius-is-unavailabl e-issue


The info has a '-' in the album title, and a ':' in the comments (Amazon Song Id:).

I removed these characters, updated genius then it worked.


Not sure how to remove all the non alphanumeric characters from 30,000 tracks though

Genius not available for songs

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