Z-man
04-09-2008, 07:54 PM
And for those who only moderately care I suppose....
Some of you probably know of this as it has been out for several years but allt he same I find it very nice.
Pandora Radio (http://www.pandora.com/)
Simply put, it's the closest thing to a learning music station. You set a seed song (or if you have very specific tastes like me maybe you set 20-30 seed songs/artists) and then let pandora feel it's way around that starting point and guide it by "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" the songs you hear. Or if you just don't care enough don't rate any of it and let it go on it's own.
Much of the work I do each day (7-8 hours to be exact) is in front of the computer and over the many months I have used Pandora I have logged over 1000 hours into it training it to see how smart it really is.
Overall I am pretty happy with it. The program seems to be set to intentionally stray off in a direction to see if you like it or not and if you thumbs down a bunch of stuff it will veer back into safer music it knows you will like.
There really isn't any cost or crappy hoops you have to jump through that I can see. The only things to note are:
1- You can only skip like 10 songs per hour (which usually does not happen). If it does you can just switch to another station and the new one starts with all 10 skips available
2- You have to let the Pandora window be the front window in relation to any other browser windows. So if you had 2 tabs open or 2 windows open in Internet Exploder or FireFox or Safari and Pandora was not the one you were viewing, after the song it was playing ended the system would pause for you to tab back over to it. You can however be working in another app and it will keep playing.
3- After you have rated a few thousand songs it starts to run out of material.... so if you spend that much time you might start hearing the same thing over every week or so..... (listening for 8 hours a day mind you)
I think they make their money from the ads (which surprisingly are not that intrusive) and the very wise placement to 1-click buy the song or album from Amazon and iTunes.
I actually bought 5 new CD's from finding the artists on here.
And of course you can do that whole MySpace kinda thing where you can share your stations and make comments and all that crap if that appeals to you.
Some of you probably know of this as it has been out for several years but allt he same I find it very nice.
Pandora Radio (http://www.pandora.com/)
Simply put, it's the closest thing to a learning music station. You set a seed song (or if you have very specific tastes like me maybe you set 20-30 seed songs/artists) and then let pandora feel it's way around that starting point and guide it by "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" the songs you hear. Or if you just don't care enough don't rate any of it and let it go on it's own.
Much of the work I do each day (7-8 hours to be exact) is in front of the computer and over the many months I have used Pandora I have logged over 1000 hours into it training it to see how smart it really is.
Overall I am pretty happy with it. The program seems to be set to intentionally stray off in a direction to see if you like it or not and if you thumbs down a bunch of stuff it will veer back into safer music it knows you will like.
There really isn't any cost or crappy hoops you have to jump through that I can see. The only things to note are:
1- You can only skip like 10 songs per hour (which usually does not happen). If it does you can just switch to another station and the new one starts with all 10 skips available
2- You have to let the Pandora window be the front window in relation to any other browser windows. So if you had 2 tabs open or 2 windows open in Internet Exploder or FireFox or Safari and Pandora was not the one you were viewing, after the song it was playing ended the system would pause for you to tab back over to it. You can however be working in another app and it will keep playing.
3- After you have rated a few thousand songs it starts to run out of material.... so if you spend that much time you might start hearing the same thing over every week or so..... (listening for 8 hours a day mind you)
I think they make their money from the ads (which surprisingly are not that intrusive) and the very wise placement to 1-click buy the song or album from Amazon and iTunes.
I actually bought 5 new CD's from finding the artists on here.
And of course you can do that whole MySpace kinda thing where you can share your stations and make comments and all that crap if that appeals to you.