Left-handed Complement

MUDGE’S Musings

From the Machinist blog at Salon.com comes, coming to you slightly late as I work off my backlog, this excellent news:

2007.07.13 • 14:16 PDT

Article removed at the polite request of the copyright holder

Machinist: Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles – Salon

This is wonderful news for those of us who have become addicted to internet radio. Longtime reader may recall that I waxed poetic over Pandora.com early on in this blog’s history (way, way back in May of aught-seven). My love and respect for this service has only increased since then.

You’ll recall that Pandora, part of an organization titled the Music Genome Project, builds “stations” for you based on music that you tell it you like, in an effort to open you up to new or long-lost sounds. It has worked for me, for whom “popular” music has never ranked anywhere near more serious, classical music.

I haven’t had too much luck finding classical music stations on the internet that are decent quality, either artistic (too much “light classics” and short works all too commonly heard), or technical (streams get broken, even with a broadband connection all too frequently). And most suffer from way too many commercials — just what I’m trying to avoid by getting away from over-the-air.

So, Pandora is commercial free (of course there is advertising on the web page itself, but no spoken ads, thank goodness!), the sound quality is exquisite (when I listen via headphones at work, the channel separation and fidelity seem first-rate, at least to these elderly ears), and I’m exposed to popular music I may have only rarely heard, if at all.

When one “station” gets too repetitive, I switch; I must have a lot. Okay, I’ll count them, since I ask… 56! Whew! But plenty of variety, limited by your imagination. Because when you listen to a song you like, you tell the system, and it will play it again sooner. If you indicate you don’t like, they lose it. And you can take a song from one station and build an entire new station around it.

My taste in popular music is strange, and old: Beatles absolutely, and lately Beach Boys, which is where I started. Now I’ve got a Dr. John station, a Herb Alpert station (sorry!), a Walk Like an Egyptian station (now I know you’re doubled up laughing). But there is something very sexy sounding about those girl bands of that era, that’s fun, especially at work.

Anyway, free internet radio was threatened, per the above story, and I for one am thrilled that it lives on. Oh, yes, what am I listening to right now? Pat Benatar’s We Belong, on the Orinoco Flow station. Try Pandora.com before you laugh at me any more!

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Technorati Tags: Pandora.com, Music Genome Project, internet radio

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Internet Culture, Intro, Music, musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.