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Written by Eric Watt
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Apr 25, 2006 at 11:40 PM |
Using a detailed database of music characteristics, Pandora is able to quickly determine your tastes in music. Using a cross platform flash player, music of this type is then streamed to your computer.
Do you have a hard time finding music that you like? Wouldn't it be nice if there was a product that could take a few simple likes and dislikes, and find artists and songs that you're likely to enjoy? Enter Pandora. A group of musicians and music lovers that have spent the last 6 years analyzing and categorizing over 10,000 different artists as part of The Music Genome Project.
Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.
When you visit the website, a simple flash based music player loads and asks you for a single band or song that you like. Using this input, it can then reference the Music Genome database and find music of similar quality. You can listen to this music as it is streamed to your computer, and tell Pandora whether you liked it or not. Any songs you do not like will not be played again, and songs of a similar quality will be less likely to be played. If you indicate that you like a song, songs of a similar type will be more likely to be played. Using these feedback mechanisms, Pandora can quickly determine your likes and dislikes.
You can try out a few songs, but then you must register. While registration is free, you will receive ads unless you pay a subscriber fee of $3-4 a month. Currently, the ads are unobtrusive, and there are no audio ads, though this may change in the future. Once registered, you get unlimited 128Kbps audio streamed to your computer. You can maintain up to 100 radio stations, which can be shared with your friends. You can maintain a different set of preferences for each radio station.
Initial testing here in The Playground indicates a general consensus that Pandora rocks. There are a couple issues however. While the database contains many artists, both popular and obscure, it is by no means complete. However, pretty much everything I've tried has been found. I also had trouble registering in firefox and was forced to use internet explorer (blech), though others did not have this problem. Even with these small issues, Pandora remains a great product, and currently has a permanent tab in firefox on my computer. Plus, it has a cool name.
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Last Updated ( Sep 22, 2007 at 08:27 PM )
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