Apologies for no Tuesday Triple Play this week. Perhaps a review of Pandora.com will make up for it.
On a tip from Steve Borsch – I started a couple Pandora stations using two of my favorite bands as starting points (Too Much Joy Station, Transplants Station).
On the plus side
I’ve got nearly a solid work day of listening behind each and all the recommendations have very much been in the same vein as the originating artist. Even some other songs from other artists in my library have popped up.
Without Pandora, I wouldn’t have found Lucky Boys Confusion. So, a win for Pandora.
I’ve been using the jrc’s Pandora Dashboard Widget – which is more convenient and persistent than a browser window for me.
I’m only rating the songs (thumbs up/thumbs down) if I feel strongly one way or another – and just letting ‘OK’ songs run unrated. Hopefully that’s a feature and not a bug.
Giving a song the thumbs down stops it from playing and automatically jumps to the next song. Nice.
On the downside
Everything about Pandora is in Flash. Everything – from handling account info, to emailing the station links, to controlling volume, and rating tracks. Annoying.
Especially annoying because a double-click is needed within the Dashboard widget to trigger anything.
I’d like an easy way to see all the songs played in a station since it’s conception and how I rated them. Bonus points for providing it as an RSS feed. I’ve only seen what I’ve rated, and I now don’t remember where I found it. Yes, I’m talking Attention.
A station’s URL should be obvious. I shouldn’t need to email it to myself to add it to a weblog post.
Thats all for now.
UPDATE 31 Dec 2005
Hearing the same song twice in the same listening session is annoying. This is the problem I’ve had with broadcast radio for years and with my iTunes/iPod pre-podcasting. Sure, I have playlists set up to play and repeat. I’m controlling that. When I’m listening to Pandora, I want to continually discover new music. If I want something repeated, I’ll hit replay it myself. Conceiveably, Pandora has access to all the music in the world. Unfortunately, after 10 days, it sounds like I’ve hit the limits of their catalog.
Why is it that pandora is routinely broken? I listen to it at work a lot and it always says the engineers are working on it. What is that! Slacker radio has not let me down yet.