http://www.pandora.com/

Cool idea, I wonder if they developed some technology to automatically extract characteristics out of the songs. (*goes to read the faq)

Greetings.

I doubt they do the analyzing automatically(when adding new songs). They probably check out a CD.... pick one or two representative tracks..... and then rate them on a number of sliders.

Other similiar sites and systems only used "listener-patterns", which imho were quite useless, because the resulting patterns tend to not have much to do with the music itself, but instead "scenes" and subcultures. So, once you're not a scene-type, it would recommend you all kinds of unrelated music.

Pandora instead adds rating of music-characteristics into the mix, and from the 30mins so far in which i've used it, that works very good! At least for me. What i miss - as with most of those sites - is that it doesn't know about many artists to which i listen.

- Lyx

I'm using this now, it's great!

Although it's yet to reveal any music that I like that I don't already know about. It's only had 20 minutes or so though!

I've been using Pandora for a couple of months now, and I love it -- it has introduced me to several new artists.

I've created several different "stations," and I find I get better results (i.e. higher ratio of songs I end up liking) when I base the station on an artist rather than a particular album or song.

Lately, I've also tried to be conscientious about rating songs I like and songs I don't like, but I'm not sure that doing so has had a significant impact on the results. I'm guessing it hasn't collected enough preference data from me yet to really matter.

Wow, this is really nice.

I'm liking this! Already discovered one band!

Well I've created a bunch of stations out of the artist names whose output is known to me, an noticed a bunch of funny things.

Try Laibach, for example.

Normally, it ought to be industrial, but Pandora gives me all kinds of house/breakbeat/electroclash-alike stuff that is not even close to Laibach's output.

P.S. Just turned it on, and guess what? It played “Tanz mit Laibach”, a Laibach song.

P.P.S. Sadly this thing doesn't know such artists as Coil, Boards of Canada, Einsturzende Neubauten, Muslimgauze and Current 93, which I'm very fond of.

i like this better http://www.last.fm/

a friend just told me about and I tried it out, it's not that bad though
my example (without registration) was The Beta Band... it played a few not so bad things but half of the stuff it came up with was from the Beta Band itself

maybe I should register and give it a try

I second that.

The recommendations in last.fm are based from what you listen to and what people with similar tastes listen to. Which to me sounds better than the way that pandora does it.

what codec does Pandora stream it's stuff with? just out of curiousity

Its unlikely not to be MP3, the faq just says its 128 kbs, but neither the faq or the blog names the codec. The webplayer is in Flash which only natively plays mp3 files. I searched a partial decompile of their player and only found standard (mp3) play calls. I think its unlikely theyve hidden a different codec in there, but the whole thing didnt decompile successfuly using "flare" -a freeware actionscript extractor.
128 cbr is fine for me here though

Heres the station im making, MishMash at Pandora

Post better ones

Yea, I read on a blog comparing Pandora and Last.fm that they do all the track characterizing manually. It'd be really interesting to see the interface they have to do it

I just registered a (free) account and plan to try it out for a while alongside Last.fm

I read about both sites ( and a couple others i have not checked-[musicstrands dot com and webjay dot oh are gee]..in Rollingstone magazine.
[Other places I go for a similar experience are Somafm dot com and Live365 dot com]
The (Pandora)stream is 128kbps as mentioned in the sitesFAQs and previously in this thread. This is not my preferred level of music quality/bitrate but..
I find the idea of the site to be an intriguing way to expose ones self to new music.

Sometimes the problem with playlists and iPods and the like is that they put a person too much in control of the music listening experience. A little randomness and something unexpected or never before heard can be very enjoyable and help your musical taste grow and/or refine (for me anyway!)

And their is a nice Audioscrobbler plugin and a Last.fm plugin for Slimserver/Squeezebox Although Pandora is getting a link to the SqueezeNetwork (problem being Pandora is US only, LastFM is not!)