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Comparison of Pandora and Last.fm

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the tell-me-what-i-like dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Blogger Steve Krause takes an interesting look at how music recommenders Pandora and Last.fm work, including some algorithmic strengths and weaknesses. Although he seems to think Last.fm is better now, his punchline is that a combination of their approaches will eventually be the real winner and for that, Pandora can more easily become like Last.fm than the other way around."

3 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Lastfm by danboarder · · Score: 5, Informative

    Both are great, but LastFM plays in Winamp and other players, while Pandora requires Flash in a webpage... so I prefer Lastfm. Related: www.TubesMusic.com will soon let users do either one when it's available, so I've heard.

  2. Re:Pandora and DRM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Last.FM is similiarly trivial to rip.

    Each track is seperated by a string, "SYNC" which the player detects. It's pretty easy to copy the stream, split it into multiple files and automaticaly tag and name them correctly actually. It took me about 20 minutes to hack some Python together to do it.

  3. Re:Perfect timing by flaneur · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sigh, indeed...we've been planning this downtime (which involves a major upgrade to our streaming capabilities) for weeks now, so it would figure that we would get Slashdotted at precisely this moment!

    We're also busy readying some cool new features to be released by the end of the week...subscribers will also have access to a beta site (beta.last.fm) later today to try out some of these new goodies.

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    http://www.last.fm/user/flaneur