Les Jones: Entertain Us

April 10, 2007

A&E > Entertain Us

Tony McGill emails:

Check this Pandora thing out. It is part of the Music GNOME project. You create stations based upon an artist or a song. It selects and plays songs with similar musical characteristics to the songs and artists you pick. It also lets you give feedback on the songs on your channel(Thumbs up,Thumbs down). I am sharing a channel Jay created.
Jay's Crap Radio

It ain't bad and it's free. I haven't grokked the interface entirely, but here's what I know.

You can visit the front page and see what's playing.
If you don't like the current song, click the fast forward button to go to the next song.
If you do like the current song, click on the big icon to get a menu of options. You can hear more songs by that artist, or more songs in the same style by different artists.
There's a search feature, but you can't play particluar songs on demand. Chris Range explained this to me a long time ago when he had an Internet radio station. You're not allowed to create a "digital jukebox" in which the user can pick individual songs without paying licensing fees to the publisher.

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Comments

I fooled around with it & then got bored with the music it offered me. I much prefer the video jukebox that is YouTube nowadays. Even with the onslaught of the copyright cops, there are plenty of really rare music videos, plus lots of amateurs & cover bands playing great versions of the tunes.

Posted by: The Sanity Inspector at April 10, 2007

got bored with the music it offered me.

Bored?? Really? While it seems like they only licensed a few songs from most artists, and hence there's more repetition than I'd like, I'm still constantly finding all sorts of great bands I've never heard of before. Some were obscure to me only because I'm a geezer now, but there's plenty of actual obscure stuff on Pandora, too.

The key to keep it interesting, imo, is to seed your channel with all sorts of genres so there will be lots of surprise about what song will get played next. They obviously anticipated people doing this -- there's a really pleasing balance struck between minimizing jarring genre changes and keeping a high level of variety. So you might start out with Fugazi followed by a string of 3-5 similar bands, then it switches gears and will start playing guitar-driven bossa-nova for a little while, then 60s garage-rock, etc.

Posted by: Steve K. at April 11, 2007

That would be Genome not Gnome. Tony McGill has always been a bad speller. As far as Pandora goes, I think this is just a tool to use what you know you like to find other stuff you like. Since we have such easy access to music these days it is a challenge to keep things fresh.

My 15 year old son wasn't impressed with Pandora either. Of course he says their are only two kinds of music, cool and gay. Guess what he says I listen too.

Posted by: Tony M at April 11, 2007

You know who's not gay? Shiina Ringo's not gay. OMG. I want to have Shiina Ringo's baby, or something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru-ciyUAZFI&mode=related&search=

And this is, like, the greatest big, dumb guitar hook ever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVqc-978gFs&mode=related&search=

Ok, this is sort of gay, I guess, but it's still great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyf9M7mt_RY

Posted by: Steve K. at April 11, 2007