I rarely listen to the radio. When I do, I almost listen exclusively to KQED, which is not the best source for hearing new or old Chinese music. So, I pretty much depend on the Genius Just For You feature in iTunes to discover new music. iTunes seems to handle English artists and songs quite well; however, it experiences difficulties when dealing with Chinese artists and songs.

If I search through my own music for 王菲, iTunes will only return the songs by 王菲. If I search through the iTunes Store for 王菲, iTunes will return the songs by 王菲 as well as the ones by Faye Wong. Curiously, iTunes will return the songs from Zhi Mi Bu Hui from the artist Faye Wong, but not the ones from Wang Fei. So, when iTunes recommends Chinese songs, I have to make sure that I don’t already have their recommendation in my collection. And, this double-checking is not a straight forward process because I have to search through all permutations of a song’s or artist’s name: English, Pinyin, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Ugh…

The other issue that troubles me is that some song titles are obviously incorrect, like 桃花开, which was inartfully translated to Peach Bloddom Come Out. If this was Wikipedia, some of these errors would already be corrected.