Katsu (hearts) Pandora.FM
Taking a break from the (a)religious flamewar going on below, let’s touch on something I recently discovered that I think is freakin’ brilliant: Pandora.FM. What is it? basically, it’s a mashup of the two best music reccomendation engines I know of: Pandora, and last.FM. I’ve been using both for a while now, as each one has its own charm and uses. Pandora, for example, lets you create a station with as little as one song or artist to build from, letting you stream good, high-quality music no matter where you may be. As you listen to the station, you can fine-tune it to your tastes by giving each song a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, which allows Pandora to find out more and more about the type of music you like, and give you more of it. Part of its beauty, to me, is the ability to have multiple stations: Pandora doesn’t just learn if you like rock, country, and dance, it learns exactly what kind of rock, country, and dance you like, and you can have individual stations for each of your tastes, tailored for you.
And then there’s last.FM. I love this service, because it allows me to track, tag, and view everything I listen to, by integrating into Winamp, Windows Media Player, Amarok, or whatever media player I happen to be using. Then, I can mark what I like, what I don’t, and build feeds and lists for me to go through and share with others. What was that track that you listened to a couple days ago about the monkeys? last.Fm knows. It also has a strong social aspect: get your friends to join up, and you can each see what the other is listening to, and make recommendations. The system is even smart enough to learn what tracks that you might like they’re listening to, and it’ll point them out to you. Add the ability to buy tracks directly through iTunes (and even the occasional free mp3 directly from the site), and you’ve got a winner.
Unfortunately, up until now, both services were separate: when I listened to my Pandora station, last.FM knew nothing of it. Songs I love came and went, and I’d lose track of them. Enter Pandora.FM, one of the coolest little mashups that RSS ever made possible. You log into Pandora.FM using your last.FM account, and the service takes care of the rest. As songs scroll by on your Pandora player, a bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to tag them, view and edit their metadata, and submits them to your last.FM profile, so when you look at your feeds, there’s everything you’ve been listening to, tagged, bagged, and ready to parse. Not to mention (if you use the ‘More Options’ interface), view information on the track, the band, your recently played tracks, top played tracks, browse photos and videos of the artist playing, and even start new Pandora stations based on the track you’re listening to. Sweetness. If you’re not using any of these services right now, I can’t recommend them highly enough for discovering new music to listen to. Go sign up for last.FM, set up a Pandora station or three, and feel the love with Pandora.FM.
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