Pandora - very cool online music service

http://www.pandora.com/

This is great. You put in an artist or song that you love and it plays you songs that are similar, based on a ton of different characteristics. It tends to be way off at first, but you rate them up or down as they're played and it adjusts accordingly.

I put in Porcupine Tree (sort of pink floyd meets radiohead) and the first song it gave me was Michael Bolton! heh. After about twenty songs it's giving me about one in five that I've never heard before that I really like. Cool way to discover some new tunes. And it's playing me a bunch of really obscure P-Tree stuff (heard it all before but surprised they even have it). Definitely a cool service.

There's something even better about Pandora. It saves the mp3 files it plays to your hard drive in a temporary directory. In MacOS the files are called "/tmp/WebKitPlugInStream*". At first we started using MusicBrainz to rename and add the id3 tags but then the household code monkey came up with a way to download and tag the songs automatically using the stored XML files in the temporary directory. We've discovered (and downloaded) more new music in the past two weeks than any time in the past year.

~Ulrika~

Great find, Chip!

That's a very nice service.

They don't seem to have any opera though. They couldn't find Puccini or Bizet.

-WW