At Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event earlier this month, the computer company updated its lineup of iPods and introduced a new version of iTunes – iTunes 8.

Though Apple has added some accessibility options to the software by hiding older features while reorganizing the preferences pane, the real changes are in browsing, a new visualizer and the highly-touted “Genius” feature.

“Genius” is a playlist creation tool that can automatically produce a playlist derived from a selected songs’ attributes.

Highlight a song in your library, click the “Genius” button at the bottom of the screen and iTunes will generate a new playlist based on that song choice.

The feature appears to be a rebranding of the rarely used (and often disabled) iTunes Mini-Store.

The Mini-Store was a dumbed-down approach to compete with music recommendation sites such as Pandora Radio’s “Music Genome Project.”

Genius is now available on all non-shuffle iPods for on-the-go playlist creation.

But before Genius can work, iTunes must gather information about users’ libraries.

Depending on Internet connectivity and the size of the user’s library, this takes about 15 minutes.

Those who have illegally downloaded need not fear: Apple claims this is a completely anonymous process.

Genius generally worked as claimed but I found a huge hole in the software.

Any song that was not sold from the iTunes music store cannot be used with Genius.

It seem that a big component of the necessary algorithm runs parallel to the artists mentioned in the “Listeners Also Bought” pane in the online store.

This left a large portion of my library unusable with the new feature.

Apple also adds a new default visualizer to iTunes 8. The visualizer is a welcome improvement from the old one, now called “iTunes Classic Visualizer.”

The last major change is the graphic interface. Browsing by grids has replaced the older artwork view option. The grid view allows users to browse by album artwork without resorting to the memory-intensive “Cover Flow” display added in last year’s iTunes 7.

When users float the cursor over the album cover, the graphic will change to different albums by the same artist.

Apple added a smart search bar with a drop down menu for more narrowed searches.

With iTunes 8, Apple has added more options and made it more streamlined, efficient and user-friendly.

Though the new Genius feature may help users rediscover some songs lost in the cavities of their libraries, the feature doesn’t work for those with obscure tastes, unreleased tracks or songs from many mixes.

The new iTunes teeters on becoming bloatware. It uses a significant amount of system memory in comparison to the version it replaces.

On my MacBook, the program occupied, on average, 100 more megabytes of RAM.

This may decrease the overall speed of a user’s computer, especially on a PC.