Pandora
by Scott Hardie on November 15, 2009
[This post wound up being very long-winded and self-absorbed, but that's what blogs are for, I guess.]
For years, I've gotten increasingly picky about how I listen to music. Sometimes I just want to listen to everything I have on shuffle, but sometimes I want to get more specific like only music from one genre on shuffle or all songs by one artist in chronological order, and sometimes I want to get really specific, like songs about dreams or artists from Michigan or recordings featuring violins.
I tried getting into MP3s when they first came out in the nineties, but back then the sound quality was horrible and hard drive space was limited, so I stuck with CDs. As the world embraced MP3s around me, I continued buying those plastic discs and carefully putting them into my 400-disc carousel or lugging them to work and back. This largely changed earlier this year, when the carousel got some kind of scratch on the laser and started skipping every song like I'd run the disc through a washing machine, and the stereo on my desk began failing to play sometimes. Everything seems to break down in this apartment, but maybe this failure was for the best: It might finally force me to get MP3s like everybody else, or whatever format people listened to these days (M4As?).
But how could I get exactly the options that I wanted, as a picky listener? There are hundreds of programs out there for playing music files, some that would allow tagging the way I like, but having used quite a few systems over the years, I worried that I was too picky for all of them; that I couldn't find exactly the combination that I wanted. For a while, I contemplated building my own system: Either a dedicated web server or a cloud-based hosting environment where I could store a huge collection, a PHP/MySQL-based interface for storing tons of information about every song and create exactly the playlist that I was in the mood for, and a Flash-based interface for playing the songs, with options like keyboard hotkeys. Never mind that I would estimate hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to build this if I were being asked to build this for someone else; this was my music program and I wanted it to be exactly right. Every hour would be worth it! What stopped me was being broke. With Kelly laid off earlier this year, we couldn't afford to buy any music at all, let alone hosting for music. I built an interface for my program, but never loaded any music into it.
In late summer, I discovered Pandora. I'd heard of it many times since friends had been using it for years, but I'd tuned out all discussions about it because I was too stuck in my ways. The website delivered immediately: After playing a Joe Satriani song that I requested, the system followed with a Gary Hoey song that sounded amazingly like a lost Satriani song. Here was an artist I'd never heard of but liked immediately, in less than five minutes. The system went on to play lots of other great songs by lots of other artists that I told it I liked. I listened to it more and more, at work and at home. I bought the annual subscription. I used it (much less than planned) at GooCon. I installed the desktop app. Within months, it has changed the way I listen to most of my music, and I recommend it highly.
Pandora is not exactly what I want. It needs hotkeys so I don't have to keep changing windows, and the auto-play when I launch is annoying, and I still find myself pausing it and playing a specific song or artist on YouTube when it gets me in the mood for something. But it still provides an excellent alternative when I'm just not in the mood to fuss with CDs, and it has quieted most of my frustrations about listening to music the old way. In a year or two, I plan to buy a better computer and build a collection of music files at home, setting aside my ambitious plans for a perfect system and settling for something close to it. Pandora seems more than capable of lasting me until then.
Two Replies to Pandora
Matthew Preston | November 15, 2009
I agree Scott that Pandora is an excellent concept. I use it all the time (around the house, at work, in the car). When you do decide to go fully digital with your music collection, I highly suggest going with an open format (.mp3), nothing proprietary. I made the mistake of not keeping an eye on iTunes when I ripped my cd's and the majority are all in .m4a. This would be fine if I ever only wanted to play them on an iPod. Of course they don't work on any other device. Now that I have the motorola droid phone, I'm busy converting all the iTunes files to .mp3's. All devices that play digital music all play .mp3's.
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The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
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Jackie Mason | November 15, 2009
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