Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Pandora, my new online music friend...

I am always on the lookout for new ways to listen to music at work. I am a Yahoo Music subscriber, but I am not able to download and install the jukebox on my work computer (surprise). A friend introduced me to finetune last year and I was pretty excited about the prospect of building playlists and filling them with my favorite tunes to listen to at work at my leisure. The problem with finetune is that the audio quality, well, sucks. I understand the bandwidth restrictions imposed by being a 'free' service, but I am a borderline audiophile and audio at, I'm guessing, around 24-32kbps just doesn't cut it. So embarked on an adventure to find some thing else with higher audio quality and a price point of zero. My discovery? Pandora. The downside to Pandora is that you don't build playlists, rather, you tell it what type of music you like and it plays what it thinks you will dig. My experience so far has been fabulous. I gave it 6 artists that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other and it plays great songs! Even the artists that I have never heard before seem to fit my musical tastes. Now, it's not 100% on all of the time, so I just give the songs I don't like a 'thumbs down' and it no longer plays them. Along those lines, if you think that you hear a song too often you can tell your 'station' to not play the song for a month - brilliant! You can build as many stations as you wish and assign different artists to each for whatever mood you may be in. You can bookmark songs, artists, etc. Now if it only worked for my Wii I would be golden! So kudos to Pandora. Thanks for keeping music free and semi-controllable for the listening masses!

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1 comment:

wilson said...

Thanks Matt! It's great to hear that you're enjoying Pandora. :)

- Lucia, at Pandora