The box of Pandora.com
Do you know Pandora.com? If you don’t, feel free to surf there and give it a try, it’s guaranteed satisfaction.
Pandora.com offers a truly unique service : using their Flash based player and Music Genome Project, you can enter a search term (for example Morcheeba) and this great tool offers to help you discover more music like that you just entered that’ll suit your needs. Most of the times, it works flawlessly and it produces fascinating results. Users can listen to Pandora selections by using the built-in Flash player, pretty much like any other streaming radio station.
For a free registration, any user can have up to 100 different “stations” in which he can add more music (either based on Artist Name or Song Name), while he also can rename, edit, delete and share with friends, through e-mail. If you cannot tolerate ads, Pandora also offers an advertisement-free registration for $36 annually or $12 quarterly.
Pandora.com also offers a great rating system. By clicking on each song tab, you can rate it using the “I like it” | “I don’t like it” options. If you like it, the system will try and find some more similar music. If you don’t like it, the program asks humbly for pardon and quickly replaces it with another song, making sure that the previous one is never played in the particular station. A “Favourites” functionality is also incorporated, while your Favourite lists can be printed or share in a particularly easy way.
On the commercial side, Pandora also offers the option to buy the songs you listen to, either via Amazon or iTunes. Convenient.
Five Things I Love About It :
- It works. Enough said. And if it doesn’t work, you can guide it through the ranking options.
- It’s free. You can use the service for absolutely nothing, if you can tolerate ads.
- It supports all kind of music genres. It worked successfully for me and my New Age, Trip Hop and Nu Metal stations.
- Simple and intuitive interface makes listening to Pandora a breeze.
- Radio window can also be “minimized” (using a pop-up window) and not occupy a full page of your browser.
Five Things I’m Skeptical About :
- The whole interface is designed in Flash. Not very accessible and a bit bulky.
- Somewhat repetitive. If you happen to like a song, it has a tendency of repeating it every time you re-open a station.
- As any online station, songs can scroll only forwards and not backwards. Not exactly their responsibility, but…
- You can skip songs only a few times during an hour. Annoying, especially when you first create a station.
- The Favourites page could be renamed as a “To investigate” page, since by using Pandora you usually find music you’ve never heard about, and some songs need further investigation rather than just a favourite.
To summarize, Pandora.com is quickly becoming my web radio station of choice. With a bit of tuning, you can have about every music genre that ever existed under your fingertips. A very ambitious and finally useful project, essential for any music lover!
