jonny m sent me a link to pandora – you type in a music track or artist and on the basis of that it creates a station for you to listen to. as each track plays you can add to the intelligence of the station – i.e. yes more like this or no thanks and the station develops to your (impeccable of course) taste. inspired by jonny i typed in the dead texan to see how it might work with something obscure but it’s clearly an impressive playlist and database because not only did it play a cool dead texan track but also selected some wonderful similar music i had never heard of. it is simple but absolute genius…
i am making it a worship trick. you’ll need to be in a location with broadband but if you are like karen ward and made wireless internet the first thing you did when you started a church you’ll be fine. or if you meet in someone’s home or whatever. this selection playing now would be a wonderful soundscape for contemplative worship. if you didn’t like a track just have someone click next! (thanks jonny for the discovery)
[update: broken links]
Pandora’s cool, but personally I much prefer http://last.fm. It does a similar thing, but instead of basing it on a mathematical analysis it uses social networks and a comparison of your listening with that of other people with similar tastes.
We have a Greenbelt group set up that you can find at http://last.fm/group/Greenbelt
i agree with James. Last FM is definately my preference too. i’ve been using it almost non stop since discovering it and has good social network functions.
That’s a great site.
Thanks
i’ll check out last fm – thanks…
I’ve been enjoying and recomending pandora (it seemed a lot easier to get into than lastfm), but after a few days it now wants me to register and insists on a US zip code. Did you not get this far Jonny? (or do you have a secret holiday home in Florida)
These are both really exciting sites, though I am leaning more toward last.fm right now. Pandora requires you to keep the browser window active to play the next song. Last.fm’s player that you install works much better, with quicklinks to the band info,cd, and website.
Also-
Last.fm suggests that you install 2 applications, though you can only install the player if you prefer. The other app reads your music library to populate your profile and share your music choices with others.
-jason