Let's talk about Pandora (2nd place in SEOmoz's music category). Pandora provides streaming audio, and allows you to create customized "stations" that will (theoretically) play only music you like.
Here's how it works: start by entering the name of an artist you enjoy (or you can select one of their existing "genre" stations). Pandora will start playing music by that artist, and also by other artists who have (in their view) similar musical characteristics. As each song plays, you have the opportunity to give it a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down". If you give a song a thumbs-up, Pandora uses that information to refine the selection of music your station plays; if you give it a thumbs-down, Pandora will remove it from your playlist. (If you're tired of a particular song but don't want it permanently removed, you can tell Pandora to skip it, and the song will be removed from you playlist for a month. There is a limit, however, to how many songs you can skip in a day.) Information about the individual songs and the CD's they are taken from is available; you can buy individual songs from iTunes or Amazon, or order the complete CD from Amazon.
How well does it work? Fairly well. The "listen-alike" selections seem to work best (predictably) for artists whose sound is not really unique, and it can take awhile to refine your playlists to be what you really want. Some artists seem to be represented by only a few songs, so you may hear a lot of repetition. On the other hand, I've discovered some interesting artists whose work I didn't know before.
Like any streaming media, Pandora takes a fairly fast Internet connection to work well. It also will sometimes suddenly stop streaming mid-song for no apparent reason; sometimes it will then skip to another song, but sometimes it just stops streaming for an extended period. (This latter problem could possibly be due to something elsewhere in the chain, rather than Pandora itself.)
The concept is good: customizable, commercial-free Internet radio. The execution is not perfect, but is good enough to keep me coming back. I'm not sure about its library usefulness, I must admit, though it could be a site to recommend to patrons looking for new music.
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2 comments:
Running Pandora often over the course of months on an Ubuntu 8.04 install with default audio settings, I have never encountered the problem you describe in this post.
I believe that your speculation that there is a problem somewhere else in the chain is accurate; if you are using a Windows machine, there are various known Windows API and process handling flaws regarding streaming audio.
You might want to check out Kubuntu running from within a Windows install, or set up as the native OS on another machine, and see how that changes the performance of various web technologies.
Dan - I have used Kubuntu a little, but haven't tried Pandora with it yet. Something else for my to-do list.
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