I just downloaded iTunes 8, and so far it has been a less than ideal experience.

First of all, I can’t play any of my videos from the iTunes music store until I upgrade to Quicktime 7.5.5, which Software Upgrade tells me does not exist. This includes videos I’ve had since before I upgraded–and I wanted to show Dr. Horrible to Inga, damnit!

I also set up Genius to see how it does with my music. I paused and considered the personal privacy issues and decided it was worth it to see what sorts of music iTunes recommended to match my admittedly quirky tastes.

Beyond the jump, see how they did.

iTunes fails to recognize the Beatles. Click for bigger version.

As it turns out, iTunes isn’t so hot on things like, say, really indie not-too-known albums. Like, for example, this album called “Abbey Road” by some group called, the Beatles? Or something like that?

I realize they only launched yesterday so they don’t have a huge amount of training data yet, but that seems like a pretty big gap. (For the record, both Dar Williams and Monty Python gave me recommendations for more music by the same artist in the iTunes Music store, at the very least.)

I’ll keep using it to see if it gets better, but so far, color me unimpressed. Certainly nothing on Pandora.