Opening Pandora’s Box
May 27th, 2006 by Don Ray
It is the third day since I opened Pandora’s box and I am more impressed with each passing minute. I tried the other music programs that were mentioned in Free Music Recommendation Services. I tend to agree with the article and do think that the two best were Pandora and Last.fm.
For me I like Pandora the best. To use it you do need a broadband Internet connection. If you have one and you like music, you will most likely enjoy Pandora. You can try it just by going to its webpage. I believe that all the selections are only in English because I have put in a couple of Spanish artists and have not found them.
It will download a flash music controller and ask you to create a new station. Say you put in “Dolly Parton”. It will create what it calls “Dolly Parton Radio”. The station will most likely play one of Dolly’s songs. At the same time it selects other music with similar characteristics as your original choice. I have had a couple occasions that the song I wanted was not played because of license reasons. About every fourth selection will be the artist you originally selected. If you want to continue to use Pandora it will ask you to register. Don’t worry; it won’t start nagging you to pay for the service.
If you are like me, it will bring up several artists that will be new to you, but have the qualities of music you chose. As it plays it places a picture of the album that the current song comes from on the flash player. With each new song it will scroll the previous album cover to the left.
You can left click on the current or previous selections and have several things you can do.
1. You can ask why the selection was played. – It will come back and tell you because it met certain musical characteristics that you effectively chose in making your original selection.
2. Make a new station based on this song.
3. Buy it from iTunes.
4. Buy the album from Amazon.
5. Tell them you like it or don’t like it. (this will affect your hearing it in the future).
6. Add it to your favorites page
The quality of the music is very good. The best thing is there are no commercials. If your PC has a good audio feed you can pipe it over to your stereo. I put some good speakers on my PC, so I am not currently doing that, but in the future, who knows. There is also a special adapter you can purchase and have the music be directly fed to your stereo system. This does have a service charge associated with it as well as the cost of the hardware display. If I do it, it will be PC to stereo.
For the quality, simplicity and fun factors, it blows the radio station feeds such as Yahoo, Microsoft Media Player, etc. away.
Don,
Right after you first mentioned the radio streaming programs I started using Pandora. I agree that it is pretty cool. I have six stations set up so far and am experimenting with them. One of the stations would repeat songs often (narrowly focused I guess) so I added a couple of songs & expanded the play selection quite a bit. I am going to be listening to a lot more music with Pandora. Thanks for turning me on to this service!
Rob
Glad you too are enjoying Pandora. It has been a good find for me. The quality of the music and the simple design of the user interface add a lot to the enjoyment.