Another recomendation from the BBC’s Click tv show is Pandora. Pandora is very clever. You start by telling Pandora the name of an artist or a track you like then Pandora starts playing a stream of music which is similar. The concept is very simple but the technology behind it looks quite sophisticated. Once your “station” is playing you can train Pandora by adding extra artists or by using the thumbs up and down buttons as each track plays.
So obviously I created a station based on Massive Attack and then added Portishead and Faithless to it. I have called my station “The Trip Hop Lounge” and it can be accessed by anyone (just click the link). Pandora really works because before long it also played tracks by Dubstar, Cabaret Voltaire and Tricky.
The really interesting thing about Pandora is that it is playing music that I like from many artists that I have never heard of before. I have already ordered two CDs by Curve just because they keep playing on my trip hop Pandora station.
Posted by freakent
Posted by freakent
Posted by freakent
My current favourite CD is the Kaiser Chiefs’ Employment. It was recommended to me by the same friend who put me on to Kasabian, so without any hesitation I just ordered it from Amazon. I recognised the first track “Everyday I Love You Less and Less” immediately but the others took a few plays to grow on me. But now I’m totally into it. It’s also the CD that my Son always asks for now when he gets in my car.
You probably know that there are a number of audio formats in addition to MP3 that you can use to store music in (WMA, OGG, WAV etc etc). I’ve always been an advocate of sticking with plain old MP3, simply because it’s the one standard that works with pretty much anything. But now I’ve discovered AAC, it should be just as open as MP3 and it sounds better than MP3 even at lower bit rates.
