Finding and Sharing Music With Pandora

January 13, 2006 | 14 Comments

Some of you may remember that I used to share lots of music right here on Asterisk. I realize it’s been quite awhile and as soon as I get off the rollercoster I could very well get back to that. In the meantime, I wanted to let you know about a great way to find, listen to and share music: Pandora.

Pandora allows you to create mini streaming Web radio stations based on artists and songs that you like. For example, you could create a station for Aesop Rock. Pandora will go out and pull songs and info based on that and start streaming. Here’s what my Aesop Rock station played:

Ox Out The Cage by Cannibal Ox
Stop Eating by Cex (I’ve never heard this, but it’s not bad, it reminds me of Paul Barman and Buck 65)
Watch Me by 7L and Esoteric
Rickety Rackity by Aesop Rock
The Bonecrusher by Akrobatik
Bad Man! by Murs
Breakfast Club by Z Trip

It goes on. In any case, most of these tracks have something in common with Aesop Rock. Sometimes you’ll get a few songs or a station that doesn’t really have any accurate matches. If that’s the case you can tell Pandora you didn’t like the song and that it wasn’t a good match. You can also give a track a thumbs up or ask Pandora why it picked a certain song.

It keeps track of all this info and in that way educates itself about how different music is related. Most of the time it’s pretty accurate, or at least interesting, and that makes for some great listening.

Pandora is probably my favorite Web application right now. Even before Flickr. I know I use it more, and it doesn’t have quite the same time suck that Flickr does—I could spend all day on Flickr—because you don’t need to be actively engaged with it for it to work.

Check it out. It’s free (with some minor restrictions if you don’t register) and lots of fun.

Filed under: Music
Keyword Tags: music social Pandora

Comments

1. gb said:

A friend of mine at work showed me pandora several weeks back, and I thought it was amazing (still do). Yet, for some reason, I don’t find myself using it much anymore. Maybe it’s the fact I’ve got my 60gb ipod at work, perhaps it’s my overwhelming amount of music already compiled at home… I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s the restriction of only skipping tracks a few times every hour. That doesn’t bother me if the stream is consistently spitting up great music (which it does a good portion of the time). However, if I add another influence into my stream, one that is a bit too drastically different from what I was listening to already, I suddenly start getting Simple Plan or Toby Keith, and thus I want to rip my ears off.

I could go on into how that always seems to happen to me with recommendation systems, but i’d be repeating myself.

Posted on January 13, 2006 10:07 AM | #

2. Justin Perkins said:

Wow, really cool app Keith. Thanks for the heads up. I ran over there and created an account, I was up and running in a matter of seconds. Seems like a really easy way to find new music that matches your tastes, much easier than listening to a podcast or similar. I’m looking forward to the new music I will find :)

Posted on January 13, 2006 10:34 AM | #

3. Mark Reeder said:

I’ve posted this several other places, but figure it’s worth mentioning here as well. You can save out the tracks that Pandora plays for you:

If you’re using Firefox, just take a look in your temp directory (windows users run %temp% from a windows run box (just press windows-r), OSX users check /tmp) - you should see a directory named “plugtmp” (or similar) and within that you’ll see a bunch of files named access-x (where x is a number). If you’re using a different browser, you’ll need to figure out the naming conventions of that browser (ie- Safari puts the files in the root of the temp folder and calls them “WebKitPlugInStreamXXXXXX”). Once you’ve found the files, just copy them out to a different directory, slap a .mp3 extension on the end and you’ve got yourself a shiny new music file. You can either tag it as you go based on the Pandora info or just fire up MusicBrainz and have it do the work for you.

Posted on January 13, 2006 11:38 AM | #

4. maki said:

Pandora is indeed great. It’s rather weak in classical music, which is about the only drawback I can think of.

Posted on January 13, 2006 12:14 PM | #

5. Justin Perkins said:

I think the relevancy in last.fm is a little better, but at the same time I’ve found some obscure stuff in Pandora that I’ve never seen in last.fm. I like that Pandora just runs in the browser, having to install yet another music player is a little obnoxious.

Posted on January 13, 2006 12:53 PM | #

6. beth said:

You should check out Cex’s album Maryland Mansions. He’s married to the girl from Milemarker, and they have a crazy sideproject too.

Posted on January 13, 2006 01:20 PM | #

7. Andrew said:

I second the reccommendation of Last.fm over pandora. It integrates with your mp3 player, and has got at least as good of suggestion mechanisms, plus you can set up radio stations for “things we suggest, based on what you’ve been listening to”, or “things your friends are listening to” or even “Things we suggested for one of your friends.” It’s quite amazing.

Posted on January 13, 2006 03:13 PM | #

8. Grit said:

I use both, Pandora and Last.fm.

I think Pandora is more surprising in the choice of songs it is playing.

Posted on January 14, 2006 02:45 AM | #

9. Adrian B said:

Mark, thanks for the mp3 tip.

I have been using both of late and like each of them equally. Whenever I am in the same room as my computer it is either one of these two or BBC online radio.

If only I could find a program that would add some specially tuned noise cancelling to cover the Wife telling me to turn it down!

Posted on January 14, 2006 07:16 PM | #

10. Wibbler said:

I vote last.fm every time. Seriously, those guys have it licked…

Posted on January 15, 2006 11:15 AM | #

11. Tom said:

I tried Pandora a few months ago, and the drawback I found was that it seemed to repeat a lot of songs, even though I gave it a fair amount of info - songs and artists. It seemed like Yahoo launch worked much better in that regard - rating music wise.

In fact, I just looked at it again and it loaded one song that seemed to come up every 10-15 minutes as the first song again. Great idea, but it seems to need more work. Going to try out last.fm myself.

Posted on January 15, 2006 05:55 PM | #

12. Kyle Johnson said:

Although a lot like Launch’s Launchcast, I think this service a superior for a number of reasons. Great find!

Posted on January 16, 2006 10:32 AM | #

13. Sian said:

I briefly tried it this evening (will dabble more later). For some reason it thinks Beyonce Knowles is male. Go figure.

Posted on January 23, 2006 11:02 AM | #

14. Bob Maguire said:

Does anyone remember MongoMusic? Founded by some ex-Apple employees. They had an algorithm for fingerprinting music and being able to match similar songs, albums, and artists together. The thing was, though, it actually worked! MusicBrainz was just being made available at the time, and seemed to have a fundamental flaw in their algorithm. I’ve never been impressed with MusicBrainz.

Audioscrobbler seemed like an interesting attempt, but based on a totally different idea. Now called last.fm, it just seems like a database of people’s similar listening habbits. MongoMusic could actually tell you if two pieces of music sounded the same. Audioscrobbler/last.fm doesn’t seem to work well for me, and it’s people like me who probably pollute/poison the last.fm system, as I listen to wildly different music during the same session.

MongoMusic was around during the dot.com boom, and were promptly bought up by Microsoft. They made a go of providig a Windows only service, which didn’t last long. It saddens me that MongoMusic’s system will never see the light of day again. I was buying CDs like crazy, finding all sorts of new arists I’d never heard of, and this was during the Napster craze.

And people wonder why I hate Microsoft.

Posted on January 27, 2006 08:28 AM | #