You just listened to that great track and want to explore tracks that have got similar characteristics but don’t know where to find them? In the past, when one liked a particular song or artist we try to find similar artists or their songs as classified as genres. But genre is a generalist’s approach to classify music (read artists) and very often an artist in his lifetime would have composed tracks that have different musical and vocal characteristics. If you are looking for a solution to this, Pandora is the destination.
At Pandora, each track’s musical characteristics are distinctly analyzed by trained music analysts. The music database is built using a well defined methodology that includes the use of clearly defined terminology, a dependable structure of reference, redundant analysis, and an ongoing quality check to ensure that data integrity remains reliably high. Pandora does not use machine-listening or other forms of automated data extraction.
Having said about Pandora’s methodology to classify music, the next step is to look at how the music is delivered. Pandora’s music player is flash-based and does not require any additional plug-ins other than the flash player. When using Pandora, you would come across the following features/processes.
Registration: Hassle free and simple
One would need to register first to start using Pandora services as Pandora would store your music stations based on your preferences and load every time you login. The registration is pretty simple with minimal information required to create your account. You can either opt for a free ad-supported version or subscribe to non-ad version by shelling out close to $3 a month. The ads services have not yet started and guess it would take some time so you can go for the free version.
Creating a Station: Your music discovery begins here...
Once you have registered, you need to create stations based on an artist or a song you like. After you enter your favorite artist or song, a station would be created that is going to play music that have music with similar music characteristics. Creating stations is pretty simple and you can either create a new station by clicking on the ‘Create Station’ button or while listening to a station if you like a song, you can click on the album art and select create station from song or from artist. And you have a new station added to your list!
At any point in time you can have up to 100 stations. I don’t this as a constraint unless you have a huge distinction in your music tastes.
Editing a Station: Let Pandora choose all that you would love to listen to…
Your stations need not be based on music characteristics of a single artist or song. You can add more artists and/or songs to an existing station to enable the player to be more precise while playing a station of your choice.
Pandora analyzes songs based on close to 400 music characteristics and songs with the most common music characteristics are played randomly.
If you are in doubt why a song is being played, you can always know based on what music characteristics the song is being played. If at all you do not like a song, you can simply say so and the player would eliminate songs with similar characteristics. This helps you appraise a song and also to fine tune your station to play exactly what you want to listen to.
Backstage: Discover you favorite Artists and Songs
While listening to a station, you can bookmark an artist or a song so that you can learn more about that artist or song later. Pandora has recently added a feature – Backstage that tells you all about the artists and songs in their database. The good part about this is it talks about the characteristics of a song and also lists songs that have similar music characteristics and sample them too.
Buying a song: Like a song… buy it!
Now that you have identified songs that you like, you can also buy them from iTunes’ or Amazon’s music portal.
Other Features:
Interface: Truly amazing!! Since it is a light flash-based player, it loads instantly and most of the player features are built in the existing interface and the player does not reload or open a new page (unless there is a total deviation in the content) to apply the features. This comes under Rich Internet Applications (RIA) which is a part of the next generation of web technologies known as Web 2.0.
Controls: Apart from the controls mentioned earlier, skip tracks, adjust volume, play/pause are the other controls you would find in this player. You will not be able to play again a track you just listened to as this service comes under radio and it guidelined by online radio rules. However, you can view the songs that you listened to previously.
Audio Quality: Sampled at 128 kbps, you will not have to compromise on the quality.
Advertisements: Haven’t come across any and my guess is it would take sometime before they start placing advertisements on the webpage and also including audio advertisements.
Sharing your Stations: you can share your music stations with your friends and also listen to their stations. If your station happens to be among the Top 20 most shared stations, it would be available to all Pandora listeners. Go ahead create your station, share it and let the world listen to you!
External Music Player Connectivity: Squeezebox (from Slim Devices) enables you to directly connect your broadband connection to it and tune in to Pandora. The Squeezebox is a sleek and beautiful device that can be connected to your music player. So the next time you have friends home, you can play a station you specially created and forget about someone having to be a DJ… as Pandora will do that for you. What you waiting for… doesn’t that call for a party!!!
System Requirements:
Pandora works on Windows 2000 and XP with Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox. It also works on the MacOS X 10.3+ with Safari and Firefox. Flash 7 or 8 is required (8 recommended). They recommend a machine with at least a 1 GHz processor and 256MB of RAM. You’ll also need speakers or headphones. Older desktop computers may need a sound card. A broadband Internet connection is required; dialup is not supported.
The flash player can be downloaded at https://adobe.com.
Note: As this services is categorised as OnlineRadio, the services is guidelined by the rules of offering online radio service. Hence you will not be able to select a song of your choice (like Raaga.com) to be played. This site currently plays on English language tracks.