Now that the major releases for the Zune desktop software, and iTunes have been released, many features have been added, but the major feature of both softwares are similar.

For iTunes, Apple branded the feature “Genius”. Basically what Genius does is Genius finds songs related to a song you choose to make a playlist.

However, first you have to enable Genius, and when you do, Genius sends your songs to an Apple server, which is one part I really hate. Even though it IS anonymous, I still don’t like giving my information away. Another thing that I hate about Genius is that the processing is so SLOW!!! It takes 10 minutes or so to send your songs up, and I only have 200 or so songs!!

Then, you just select a song, and press the Genius button in the lower right hand corner.

For Zune, Microsoft branded the feature MixView. MixView is automatically enabled. To use it, just click on an album, and press “MixView”, which should be on the bottom center. One thing bad about MixView is that MixView doesn’t work with songs.

When you do press MixView, the album will be processed, and the album should be in the center. After being processed, albums, artists, and others should be branching off your selected album. MixView shows the related genre, who influenced the artist, who the artist influenced, albums, and artists. However, MixView does not make a playlist. MixView just processes the information to show songs, albums, and artists that you might like.