Valerie Valens
06-14-2006, 05:45 AM
Enter a song or artist name and let this site build a radio lineup tailored to you.
>[Link]< (http://www.pandora.com/)
That's what it says on the label, so I decided I'd give it a go. I don't normally trust promises of such nature, especially since it involves audio files, but what the hey, there's nothing to lose.
So I typed in 'Angra' in the create a station menu and it searches all the relevant music. Since it's works with audio files, I expect it to merely look for the term 'Angra' in the artist and title tags and dump the list into the lineup. However I was pleasantly surprised that not only does it show me what I'm looking for, it also tells me what qualities the band exemplifies in. it doesn't end here, the second in the lineup provides a song irrelevant in terms of band and title name, but relevant in musical qualities.
To make sure it's not a fluke, I decide to skip through the lineups and saw that the songs, while leaning towards providing simillar songs from different bands, also provided a bit of variety to keep the lieup fresh. Then I searched with other terms, like the song title and more band names, and I got the same results ; Lineups that are picked by musical relevancy and a pleasant range of varieties. However, there are a few licen (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#25) sing (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#27) and avail (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#30) abi (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#32) ity (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#33) inconveniences that (hopefully) doesn't detract too much from the listening and discovery experience. The real kicker here is that you can choose to buy the songs/the album which the song came from from itunes/amazon.com respectively.
Awesome! So I decided I want to be a regular user which offered the benefit of saving up to 20,000 (?) of my created stations and my favourites list to my account. There's also the added benefit of further customizing the song lineup by giving specific songs the thumbs up or thumbs down. The signup is quite easy actually, just the typical form-filling hassle, but with a twist; The service is apparently only available to US residents currently (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#79) (DAMN!), however this limitation requires only the proof of a zip code, something which I easily obtained from my yank friends. So I filled the form and then I was greeted by the service type selection menu, it lets you choose between regular and subscriber, the only difference as of now is that subscriber service is ad free. No biggie. So I selected regular, and I'm in.
PS : Pandora requires Broadband and the latest version of flash to work.
Overall verdict : 9.4/10 (A valuable addition to your bookmarks)
>[Link]< (http://www.pandora.com/)
That's what it says on the label, so I decided I'd give it a go. I don't normally trust promises of such nature, especially since it involves audio files, but what the hey, there's nothing to lose.
So I typed in 'Angra' in the create a station menu and it searches all the relevant music. Since it's works with audio files, I expect it to merely look for the term 'Angra' in the artist and title tags and dump the list into the lineup. However I was pleasantly surprised that not only does it show me what I'm looking for, it also tells me what qualities the band exemplifies in. it doesn't end here, the second in the lineup provides a song irrelevant in terms of band and title name, but relevant in musical qualities.
To make sure it's not a fluke, I decide to skip through the lineups and saw that the songs, while leaning towards providing simillar songs from different bands, also provided a bit of variety to keep the lieup fresh. Then I searched with other terms, like the song title and more band names, and I got the same results ; Lineups that are picked by musical relevancy and a pleasant range of varieties. However, there are a few licen (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#25) sing (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#27) and avail (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#30) abi (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#32) ity (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#33) inconveniences that (hopefully) doesn't detract too much from the listening and discovery experience. The real kicker here is that you can choose to buy the songs/the album which the song came from from itunes/amazon.com respectively.
Awesome! So I decided I want to be a regular user which offered the benefit of saving up to 20,000 (?) of my created stations and my favourites list to my account. There's also the added benefit of further customizing the song lineup by giving specific songs the thumbs up or thumbs down. The signup is quite easy actually, just the typical form-filling hassle, but with a twist; The service is apparently only available to US residents currently (http://blog.pandora.com/faq/index.html#79) (DAMN!), however this limitation requires only the proof of a zip code, something which I easily obtained from my yank friends. So I filled the form and then I was greeted by the service type selection menu, it lets you choose between regular and subscriber, the only difference as of now is that subscriber service is ad free. No biggie. So I selected regular, and I'm in.
PS : Pandora requires Broadband and the latest version of flash to work.
Overall verdict : 9.4/10 (A valuable addition to your bookmarks)