I like this so much this morning as I have heard at least ten new bands whose music I like based on the one track I've heard, too many to mention here but certainly enough to keep me going for some time to come. In true fashion I already have features in mind that I would like to see, namely for the tracks played to go up to Audioscrobbler/Last.fm profile and for the currently playing track to show on my MSN window, in other words for Pandora to act like iTunes does for me now.
I just created a Cocteau Twins channel, now admittedly they are not your standard mainstream type of music so a real test for any engine but I was very shocked when it tuned to Celine Dion and The Power of Love !!
I also had one Cocteau Twins track where the quality was dreadful, very 'washy' but that's one out of 50 or so and it's a preview so fair enough. If I was paying a subscription I wouldn't be happy.
I run DU meter and notice that there is a sudden spurt of download when a new track is coming down so I presume it caches a version to the browser, with the exception of the above I am impressed with the quality.
Just discovered a small bug, when launching the Pandora player in a pop up and then clicking on "buy this song from Amazon" the mini window goes to Amazon displacing the player and for some reason the Back feature is grayed out (may be Firefox thing) but the music is still playing, now it's like the iPod shuffle experience in that I have new music and I don't have a clue who it is !!
Another observation is that my Pearl Jam channel started with a live track and then went on to give me live tracks from the following 4 artists, not a problem just an observation
UPDATE: you'll see in the comments that Tom is very quick to respond to comments which is good to see, he makes a good point re the reasons why tracks get picked and the fact we might pre-judge based on knowing what the tracks are by looking at the album art, however I think the Celine Dion thing really is a bug , you can never convince me it belonged to a Cocteau Twins station, I got round to reading the Pandora blog and noticed that they are releasing one much missed feature once you have been using it for a while, especially if it's in the background and you like a track but don't get round to switching to the window in time, and that is a station history so you can go back and look at what's been picked.
I'd still like to see the output going to Audioscrobbler and updating the "What I'm listening to in MSN" but I guess that might take an extra few days if at all seeing as it is all web based, talking of which I am going to try it out over my 3G/UMTS connection on my laptop tomorrow when I travel, I would expect it to not work as well of course but let's see.
The other thing that occurred to me (or should I say popped out of my failing memory) is that I would love to run Pandora's algorithms against my existing music collection to let it show me the links between the music I have, I have a pretty eclectic collection that has changed over time but there must be an underlying trait to the music I like and understanding that would be fantastic, I know this is what Pandora is effectively doing but I can imagine a nice graph with lines across it intersecting the related pieces of music, exploring that kind of interface across all my music would be fun !
I am experiencing a strange bug when I try to use any of the menu options in the popup version of the player (which i like as can have it on other monitor while still using browser) it loads the page in the popup and doesn't allow me to go back to the player even though the music carries on. If I go to the main Pandora page and ask it to bring back the music player it does but the original version in the popup carries on so I end up with two playing ! I'm sure they'll nail that soon, and let's face it I wouldn;t want to support all the browser configurations out there and at the end of the day it is not spoiling my enjoyment of this, my wish list, explore more list is getting way too big already (in fact a direct link to post in to my Amazon wish list rather than buy from would be cool - Tom ?)
Technorati Tags:ikisai
