Search For Your Music here- The Pandora Project

phillo said:
I know this is an old post, but I was going to post about Pandora anyway.

.....

Just had to gush about pandora my new best friend.
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^^What he said.

Haven't used it on a PC yet, since my laptop is blocked (by work) and my home PC died. However, I've been rocking this on my blackberry for a little over a month and fell in love immediately. Got a 1/8 audio line (male-male) to jack the headphone port from the blackberry to the Aux input on my car stereo and SHAZAM I've got customized satellite type radio.... Simple app available these days to play Pandora on your blackberry or iPhone - sweet.

A downside, however, is that I picked a few artists I liked, and it generated a station for each one. And it is almost like the algorithm isn't tracking my preferences across stations :\ For example, if I have a "New Order" station and an "Orbital" station, both will pull up BT's Hip Hop Phenomenon as a suggested track, but neither is aware of me having heard it before on the other station :| After the second week, I've gotten to hearing several repeats, but I'll be honest that I'm not tracking how many are on my same created station or on different stations.

They also get pissy if you 'skip' songs and limit you to 6 skips per hour, per station (another reason I have multiple stations created).

I was recently informed that they are implementing a scheme where you are capped for monthly bandwidth, unless you pay a nominal fee - which will also blow away any of the advertising that has started showing up (ugh). Still, for maybe 30 bucks for the year, I'm almost willing to pay for the unlmited, unadvertised content.....if they can prove they have enough variety and can build to my taste as well as it appears they are trying to do.

Two pluses for the site and app - there is a "Quick Mix" station automatically created, which builds playlists based on the input from ALL your station preferences; and it HAS introduced me to a lot of more artists and tracks I otherwise might not have known about...that I like :D
 
The skipping thing is because they're a radio station rather than a streaming audio site, officially. So they can't let you choose your own songs, completely. I liked Pandora, but it's not available outside the US now. (Used to be, they'd check your location on the honour system by asking for a zipcode).

My music source of choice now is Spotify; free streaming of a huge selection of artists, and you can choose what to listen to; it doesn't have a very good discovery mechanism, but by plugging it into last.fm I can get last.fm's recommendations and search for them in Spotify. (You can see my music here - most of these tracks are via Spotify).
 
I'm not a big fan of Pandora. It only has certain artists that i like and most of the suggestions are stuff Ive already heard of.

They need one of these for underground music (although then it wouldn't be as "underground"....)
 
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