Slashdot Mirror
Pandora Radio from Music Genome Project
kramthegram writes "The Music Genome Project, an attempt to define music by it's traits in a way similar to DNA defines traits in humans has led to the development of Pandora. Pandora uses the song choices you make to see what traits appeal to you and present you with custom radio station. While limiting you to thumbs up or thumbs down, the "gene" heuristics allows for a very quick adaptation to your musical tastes." Not sure how deep it goes, and I'm not sure I like that it led me from The Who to Styx and Def Leppard. But this is a neat little tool for discovering new music.
How useful will it really be? Sure, I like Punk, Alternative, and Metal. But the different bands have diffrents styles within the genra and I may love one band, but hate another similar one.
Someone save me from this sanity.
Is it anything like Last.FM, or does it run independant of other users? If it runs independant of other users, I'd say Last.FM would win in that category, because it's showing you what other people that listen to the same music that you do like.
I think Last.FM and this have the same aim, recommending music you might like, but I think Last.FM pulled it off better.
...Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Actually, it seems like an interesting idea. We all have libraries of CDs based on our likes and I suspect if the libraries were analyzed we'd find slighlty deeper relations between the disparate music we collect. I've got a very eclectic collection of music and I'd be hard pressed to see the link between Reba McIntyre, Pink Floyd, and David Sanborn, but maybe there is one.
Of course some conspiracy theorist is going to use this to determine that the music industry is actually selling the same 5 songs over and over again, just in different keys and rhythms. Because we all know it's true.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I like the user interface, but it would be cool if they would allow us to enter more than one "seed" artist. For example, I like Benny Bennassi, Patsy Cline and Rachmaninov. It would be cool to enter those three "seeds" and get some bizarre combination or mix of techno, country and classical. Fun!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
I've been loving Pandora for about a week now. Just this morning I thought, "Hmmm... maybe I should try to get this posted to Slashdot. I'll bet a lot of the Slashdot crowd would dig this," but then I thought again to myself. I said, "Self, why would you want to slashdot their server and rob yourself of this little jewel?"
If you dirty buggers bring down this server... so help me steve...
I do like the site, unfortunately though after around 3 hours of using it, it stopped giving me new songs that I liked; it just played song's I already said I'd liked, or songs I didn't like. One interesting thing is that is uses basic mp3 files for the music, so it's actually not too hard to download the mp3's directly from the server if you log the right packets.
Pity they'll be putting ads on it (soon).
... I've given up. The Pandora player insists on using Flash local storage, which I had disabled. Now, no matter what I do with the local storage settings, Pandora just keeps telling me I need to enable Flash local storage. Following their instructions doesn't help.
Too bad.
Sean
I once bought a highly recommended cd from Amazon, and it was the worst piece of noise I have ever heard (I won't mention the artist in question). But almost all the reviews were five starts and glowing. Finding new interesting artists which match your taste in music is a hard task. Could a classification system help to make suggestions?
and now that I know C a little, maybe I'll try out making a plugin or something..
/right now/.
/would/ go well. (various probability weighting schemes, decreased weight as we move on, requiring much use before it really knows you, blah blah blah...)
I have lots of MP3s. I like most of them. However, I'm not always in the mood for all of them. There is very little music I've dismissed completely as bad, so "Thumbs up" || "Thumbs down" is pretty lame (,stupid, closed-minded, moronic, a horrible basis for anything, encouraging of the already prevailent general-dumbness of people whose music I tend not to be in the mood for, etc)
What I've wanted is a system by which music can be automatically catagorized based not on whether or not I like it, but rather based on whether or not I'm likely to enjoy it
How this would work: Start with the standard "Shuffle", picking at random any song. Then, if I hit "next" right after a song starts, decide "This song doesnt go well with this other song right now", and instead try selecting one which my lack of hitting "next" in the past has indicated
The closest I've seen has been plugins which weight the shuffle based on a rating you choose, which doesnt ever fluxuate.
Point: Playlists should be quaint by now. Why should I need to choose in advance what I'm in the mood to listen to an hour from now?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Also, the personalization algorithms don't even really represent your own tastes all that accurately, at least, not until they've built up a considerable database about you.
For example, at one point in time or another, I bought some Star Wars-related product from Amazon.com. This was years ago. But to this day, every time I go to Amazon.com, they are recommending me the latest Star Wars novel or toy or DVD bonus package or what-have-you. Just what is it about my buying habits that makes them think I like Star Wars that much?
Not to mention the fact that my Amazon.com purchasing habits don't necessarily represent my purchasing habits as a whole. It's funny; I probably buy a ton more books than I do Star Wars DVDs. The thing is, I don't really like to order my books through the Web. I prefer to wander down to my local independent bookstore on my lunch break, thumb through the pages a bit, smell the paper, and then proceed to buy the books at the checkout counter using my 10 percent discount card.
As a result, Amazon, which by all rights should know exactly what my purchasing habits are, doesn't actually have the slightest idea.
Likewise, my iTunes (or Windows Media Player or whatever) probably doesn't have the absolute best idea of what music I listen to. Yes, the music I play on iTunes is probably music that I legitimately like. But it's also music that I downloaded. I do legitimately rip my own CDs to MP3 format, but I do that for my portable player, not to listen to at home when I have the original disc sitting right there. So if you were using iTunes to judge my preferences, you'd only really know about the music that I think is kinda catchy, but either I don't feel like paying for or else is too obscure for me to be able to track down and buy. You wouldn't know about any of the stuff that I liked enough to drop $18 on.
Breakfast served all day!
For those using unix, the files are cached to /tmp/plugtmp/access*
If you wanted to copy them to say... ~/pandora you could then make that your working directory and:
#!/bin/sh
for i in `ls`; do mv $i $i".mp3"; done
which will set your extensions... quick and dirty, but hey we're not keeping these songs, r-i-g-h-t-?
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss