Genius, which builds a playlist full of songs that you are likely in the mood to hear based on the initial song you select, and Genius Mixes, which algorithmically assemble mixes of your music based on Apple-identified commonalities, would at first glance seem to be perfect companions to Apple's $25-per-year service for storing your music in iCloud. But, when iTunes Match first launched, customers discovered that enabling it on their iOS devices caused the two Genius options to vanish.

Then along came iOS 5.1, whose release notes stated (in part) that the update included "Genius Mixes and Genius playlists for iTunes Match subscribers." iTunes Match subscribers the world over--or at least the two of us--rushed to install the update for that feature alone. But, that update didn't immediately deliver on its promise. For one thing, Genius Mixes, which used to occupy a space on the toolbar in the iPhone's Music app, were nowhere to be found.

For another, many users noticed that when they tapped the Genius icon to create a playlist based on the currently playing song, the Music app would only report that the track "does not have enough related songs," even in cases where those users had hundred or thousands of songs in their libraries--and even when those same songs successfully generated Genius playlists in iTunes on a Mac. In other cases, tapping the newly-returned Genius icon would merely cause it flash white ever so briefly, but not to create a playlist. We both found that tapping the useless icon on our iPads repeatedly could crash the Music app pretty consistently, to boot. (That did little to lessen our annoyance.)

We suspect the issue may have had something to do with Apple's servers for Match and/or Genius as opposed to the iOS itself. As of this writing, the Genius playlist and Genius Mixes features appear to once again be working correctly for both of us, although we needed to leverage a carefully implemented, scientifically sound fix first--one that didn't work before Friday. That fix?

We turned iTunes Match off and then on again on our iOS devices a few times.