I love the generous feeling of intimacy by giving a mix to a friend. I still haven't been able to establish that same feeling designing a playlist online with a URL to pass along to someone. Maybe within time, but not now. I will try it out someday in the near future, but jeez unless Myspace For Mobile allows playlist streaming, how are my friends going to listen to their Myspace playlist I create for them outside of their computers? (For a rant about Myspace Playlists, see my post from last October)

I have been critical about iTunes Genius in the past and feel it is still inferior to both Last.fm and Pandora as far as music recommendation apps go. However, admittedly, I use Genius almost daily. I use it to quickly build playlists to load onto my iPod. I use it nighttime playlists that use to fall asleep to. Genius offers a choice on how big you want that playlist to be (25, 50, 75, or 100 songs). I think it would be a great addition if Apple included a 5th selection: "CD". What this selection would do is build a playlist based on time (72 or 80 minutes) and not by the number of tracks. From there you can right click the playlist name from the left playlist column and select "Burn Playlist To Disc" for a quick mix-CD on the go. Why engineers at Apple didn't think of this before is debatable. Although iTunes does have a CD burning function, their decision to not associate the playlist building of their Genius application with CD burning may have something more to do with their obvious motive to help customers enjoy their iPods more and their CDs less.

And perhaps their is market research on their part that suggests that many people don't use iTunes to burn CDs.

So, in my desperate attempt to replicate my iTunes wish, I came up with a step-by-step process that I use to burn new mixtapes. It's not exactly "on-the-go", especially considering my history of trivial indecisiveness. But I was pleased with the results nonetheless.