My friend approached me with this website:
http://www.pandora.com/
Some of you might know it, but this "machine" finds out what kind of music you like. It works this way: you put a favorite band of yours in it. It'll play one of their songs and analyse it. Then after it'll look for songs/bands that resemble the style you have chosen.
For example I of course typed in my favourite, Jethro Tull. To my suprise it started playing Black Satin Dancer, which has always been one of my favorites, yet not very Jethro Tull -ish as in what they usually do. Then the next song was some folk, so that meant that it was correct in analyzing it, because Jethro Tull has a lot of folk in it. After that folk song it came up with Genesis... I actually have all their albums in the shelf.
Let's see what's next: Skipped that and jumped into Kansas - Carry On Wayward Son. As it happens I have that album too. Then some Tull again And Peter Gabriel. After 5 only one song that I don't have on album, and this is rather good too :D I'm impressed. try it out.
I've been using pandora.com regularly for a couple of months now, and I must say that I've discovered LOTS of great music I never heard about before. My one gripe about it is that it judges exclusivily by the sound (melody, instrumentation, vocals) and doesn't seem to acknowledge the style of the lyrics - which in my opinion are just as important. But I recommend it warmly to all my friends.
Oh yeah, you WILL be surprised - I have no idea what I had done to make my goth channel based on Cure, Siouxsie and Joy Division suddenly start playing J Lo, or for that matter how ZZ Top managed to invade my punk channel.
i say Tom Waits, i get Tom Jones... What the hell?
That's because it knows you really don't like Tom Waits, actually you like Tom Jones. You listen to the machine, machines are always right.
What's really is that the machine knows dEUS...
Spoiler
And what's even more interesting is that with Windows movie maker you can record any song you want, and in any format.
I've played with Pandora before, and a couple of things strike me about it. One, that I like the music I listen to for a variety of reasons, it may be witty lyrics or a select use of instruments, but Pandora will try and find the overall "sound" of the music and try and match it with other overall "sounds", and the results generally don't please me because you can't search for similar music based on "witty lyrics" or "use of tamborine"...etc. Maybe I'm just fussy ;)
Two is that sometimes Pandora has incorrect artistic information about the artist I'm listening to, therefore meaning that further searches aren't close to what I was listening to at all.
Launchcast, the radio that comes with Yahoo IM, is very similar to this. You vote on how much you like a song and they adjust what it'll play accordingly. If you don't like something, you can tell it to never play it again, and you can skip past any songs you don't want to listen to. The free version has 30 second commercials every so often and limited skips, but I seriously have never found that limit no matter how hard I try. Also, people on your friends list can listen to your station with you, which is kind of neat.
Oh, and did I mention that the following 15 songs were crap?
To think of it, I've always preached my friends, that you can't think of music as in genres. Sure, there are a few heavy bands I like, some pop, damn I even find some rap good, rarely, but some. And I was assuming after the first ones, that this had loads of progressive rock in line for me, but no, actually it keeps pushing this mainstream rock, which is good occasionally, but not what I wanted to listen to.
Well I found some awesome bands when I searched on my favorite: "12 Stones"!
thanks for the link ;)
iRate is far better IMO (google it).
I typed in Jesus Jones and it played "Welcome back Victoria", a song that isn't their normal kind of stuff, and then came on the stranglers... fair enough! I went toilet, and when I came back the thing had ended and was asking me to join. Ah well!
I entered Frank Zappa into the blank, the first song was, suprisingly "The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue", which sat with me fine, and I was actually impressed that the site had more than just stuff from the "Bongo Fury" album. Next was King Crimson, and it just so happens I would give my body to Robert Fripp, so double neat-o, but then I got a Velvet Underground song...and being the pompous music listener that I am, I acted as though someone shoved a dead rat in my gullet and I promptly closed Firefox and flicked-off the entire internet.
i thought i'd try and break it by going way back in time.. well the 70's but it managed to find bands such as Slade and the Sex Pistols, the Slade alternatives were a bit lame, but the Sx Pistols ones followed the generic well..
nice :)
I like how people in this thread listen to King Crimson and Genesis and Kansas (okay, Kansas suck). Wonderful.
This is awesome... it hasn't given me anything new yet, but it's playing songs I like so :D I'm happy. I'm listening to Def Leppard for free!
EDIT: I adore this! I'm registered for free right now but I plan to buy a subscription later on when the ads bug me too much. Worth it. This is amazing.
That's a nice site and all, but I don't like their database :P. They don't have anything I like, the only couple of bands I already know and like that they do include in their database produce bad results.
However I'll show that to some of my friends who are certainly going to love this it.
I love this thing. :D Does anyone want to share their personal stations?
I only have two stations going, "Queen station"; my Rock + miscellaneous station... pretty much has most things I like, but is mostly overpowered by rock music... and "TLC station" which is all R&B, all the time.
If anyone wants one, let me know your email address ^_-
EDIT: I'm doing an experiment with a Weird Al station, to see if the songs he parodies pop up :)
I made a "Wesley Willis" station to see what would happen. It kept playing lots of Magnetic Fields songs and deliberately low-fi cheesy synth casio keyboard stuff.
I think, this is cool! 8)
I got myself an account there.
Bad thing is: You can only register, if you enter an american zip-code.
Err... If anybody asks you, I'm from California!
Thomas, well I entered my Zip code anyway and it accepted it, so no problem there, wonder why... Though i haven't been using it lately. Got a bit bored of that pop-mainstream it pushed in all of my stations for some reason...
Quote from: Thomas Voà Ÿ on Sat 11/02/2006 18:42:02Bad thing is: You can only register, if you enter an american zip-code. Err... If anybody asks you, I'm from California!
I'd like to see some statistic of how many of that site's users have the zip-code 90210.
The main problem with Pandora is it doesn't know what you like about the piece of music it plays. So it plays you another song based on their database information and it is ordinarily a song you don't even like.
Quote from: GarageGothic on Sun 12/02/2006 00:27:39
Quote from: Thomas Voà Ÿ on Sat 11/02/2006 18:42:02Bad thing is: You can only register, if you enter an american zip-code. Err... If anybody asks you, I'm from California!
I'd like to see some statistic of how many of that site's users have the zip-code 90210.
Yeah, I got that idea, when it was too late.
Then I wouldn't had to google for a zip-code site for th US.
I hope they won't get suspicious about me having a german email adress.
Damien, there is an option for every song. You can tell if you like them or not. If you like, it'll play more songs like it, if not, it'll discard songs like that... Don't really know if this works, but you can do it. Just click the right bottun on the song it is playing.