Resistance is futile. Stupid title limit making me take out the space grumble grumble.
But seriously, you should sign up for the online radio services Last.fm and Pandora. They’re awesome. If you haven’t heard of them, they are both free and they each have distinctive features that make it worth your time.
Pandora is, in my opinion, the best of the two for the purpose of simply playing good music. It uses an unrivaled system of individual characteristics for each song, regarless of genre, called the Music Genome Project, to generate radio stations based on a song, songs, or artist(s) you “seed” it with. When you click “Thumbs-up” on a song that’s playing, it records your choice and selects more songs based on that plus the songs you’ve already used as seeds or thumbed-up. Songs are selected in blocks of four, and seeds have more of an influence than mere thumbs-ups. If you don’t like the song it selects, you click “Thumbs-down”, and it skips it (well, maybe, I’ll get to that later), never plays it again on that station, and tries not to play similar songs. You can also skip a song (or even ban it for a month) that you like, but don’t want to hear at that very moment. The only major downside is that you can only skip 6 songs per hour, and you can’t listen from outside America (proxies can get around that). It might not sound like a big deal to only be able to skip 6 songs per hour, but it especially comes in when you’re “setting up” a station and fine-tuning the selection.
Last.fm is better as a sort of catalogue. It doesn’t seem to have as many artists signed on to it (at least ones I would otherwise listen to), but *all *artists are listed on the site by the users in a wiki-like format. The really cool part is that you can download an application that first reads the play count information from iTunes (other clients are also supported, I think), reporting to your profile every song you’ve listened to on it and how many times, and then runs in the background, automatically detecting and reporting (“scrobbling”) songs as you play them. It also detects discrepancies in the play count record that come from syncing your iPod, so it reports everything you listen to on your iPod as well. This downloadable client (plus the actual website) also has separate radio stations based on what’s in your library, what it recommends for you to put in your library, or custom ones made from an artist by you. The only ironic part is that Last.fm will not “scrobble” what you play on Pandora.
Oooh. I love Pandora! I love the Quick Mix feature where I can get Ben Folds, The Smiths, XTC, Hall and Oates and Duran Duran all on the same station.
Does it seem to anyone else that the longer you listen (several hours at work), the more the station you’re listening to gets away from the music style it’s supposed to be?
That’s because it always generates the next pick of four from the last one you thumbed-up. If you don’t want it to do that, refresh. Or thumbs-down on a song, either way should restart its little selection process.
I had Pandora in the past, but uninstalled it (I forget the reason, but it wasn’t because I didn’t like it - probably to free up some space).
Wasn’t there an e-mail sent out a couple of months ago stating that Pandora and similar services were having difficulties (band-width, maybe) and needed support (not financial, I don’t think)? Could you address this for us, please?
Sorry to be so dim-witted, but when I saw your thread, I thought “Oh yeah! Pandora!”, and searched my memory banks and this is all that came up.:rolleyes:
Um, Pandora is flash-based. Maybe it wasn’t always?
But yeah, royalties have internet radio in trouble. It’s a shame; they’ve both recommended me a lot of great music. For example, I never would have gotten stuff from Yelle (a French artist) on my own, but her music is very good.
Also, post your Last.fm profiles in this thread. They have a feature where if you read another user’s profile, it tells you how musically compatible you are. You can also post your Pandora stations, if you click on “Edit this Station” and copy the URL from the new window.
SDMB Group on last.fm
And it makes sense that Pandora doesn’t scrobble last.fm since they are basically competitors, but there is a way to do it - Pandora.fm of course.
That’s interesting that you’ve listened to twice as much music as I have, but you’re highest playcount is only 34, while mine is 336 and even my 30th highest is 109.
I listen to most of my music on random, too, but with a playlist of 80 songs that I always try to finish before I sync my iPhone (which loses track of the shuffle order). I will listen to music from new artists on repeat, though.
I don’t use playlists. I’ll listen to albums as a unit, but even that’s uncommon and is generally only done when I am first listening to a new artist, as I am now with Cog. After that, they go in my massive Music folder, which is then enqueued in its random entirety to winamp.
I sometimes listen to albums as a unit, but I usually don’t like all the songs on an album, unless it’s one of favorite artists (and sometimes not even then).
I’ve been using Pandora on and off for a few years now. I like it for the most part and maybe I just haven’t spent enough time tweaking my thumbs up and thumbs down, adding certain artists and all that, but I get a bit annoyed that every time I say I like a female singer, the next 10 songs seem to be female. I’m sure there are other qualities to the songs and music that are similar too, but just because I say I like so and so, does not mean I don’t want to hear a male voice for the next 45 minutes.
Your tastes are . . . a bit more poppy than mine, but over half of my top fifty are female singers, so you should check them out if you’re interested. I vastly prefer the feminine voice to the masculine.
