Pandora

I’ve told you before about my love for the mobile versions of internet radio services Slacker and Pandora. Due to music licensing restrictions, neither service can play music on demand, and each service picks songs for your user-created custom stations in a slightly different way. The song choices I get on both services are usually right on the money. But recently I got a couple of unexpected results.

My main custom station on Slacker is built mostly around ’70s-’80s classic rock: Styx, Journey, Foreigner, Scorpions, Rush… you get the idea. I’ve had that station for a while, so I’ve done enough favoriting, banning and skipping to give it a good idea of what I like. Imagine my horror when my morning commute was marred by the sound of my least favorite REO Speedwagon song ever. REO Speedwagon is not one of the artists I selected for my station, and even if I had, the song “Take It On The Run” would have been banned straightaway.

Let me digress. Back in high school and college, I was definitely a fan of REO. Stuff like “157 Riverside Avenue,” “Roll With the Changes,” “Riding the Storm Out”… that stuff. I was quite eagerly awaiting the release of Hi Infidelity. It was one of the biggest disappointments of my young life. Song after song of unmanly whining. Ewwww. Just ewwww. In my mind, even to this day, the worst offender was “Take It On The Run.”

I may have been too stunned to click the button to ban the song. I don’t really remember, so there is a chance I will have to repeat the sad experience at least one more time.

It didn’t take much digging to find out why Slacker thought I might enjoy the song. Seems that there is a double live album from the “Arch Allies” tour that Styx and REO Speedwagon did together in 2000. Who knew!

Pandora’s surprise for me was a bit more pleasant, given that it wasn’t from Hi Infidelity. It even sort of played into my obsession with imaginary bands. I would have never expected any of my Pandora stations to serve me up a song by Hannah Montana [warning: link auto plays music/video]. Nor would I have expected to love the song, “If We Were a Movie,” [warning: link auto plays music] but I do!

This one wasn’t that hard to track down either. The station I was listening to was built around Liz Phair, and this song actually has a similar style to one of the songs on her self-titled album. You know, the second one where she went all power-pop instead of singing about blow jobs. Wait, she still sang about blow jobs. Anyway. The choice did make sense.

Much better surprise from Pandora than from Slacker, but I still love both services.

I’ve never owned an iPod. I was around when the first Walkman came out, and I have to look back in amazement at how far portable music has come. Comparing the size and weight of the original Walkman to the current iPod offerings, maybe part of our workouts back then was carrying around the Walkman!

When I bought my first BlackBerry this past November, a major goal was to eliminate the need to carry a PDA and MP3 player in addition to a cell phone. That goal has been accomplished in most satisfactory style. I often still opt to bring a small point-and-shoot digital camera and Flip Mino, even though the BlackBerry Curve has a camera and video built in, but that is another post for another day.

The music player on the BlackBerry Curve is pretty basic, but meets my needs pretty well. I didn’t have any issues transferring my music from my laptop to my Curve’s SD card, since almost all of it was already in MP3 format. I had been converting my iTunes music to DRM-free MP3 format as I purchased it, since I had a non-iPod MP3 player. When Apple broke iTunes to prevent the conversion utilities from working, I switched to Amazon for all digital music purchases. Not too long after that, Apple brought out their iTunes + DRM-free versions. May I say that I still purchase from Amazon and only when a song is available nowhere else will I ever purchase from iTunes.

I am not enough of a psycho audio freak to bemoan any sound quality inadequacies or shortcomings of the music player. At my age, and with my lack of musical skills, the difference between “real” sound quality and that of my Curve is not even a factor.

I’ve currently got three different Internet radio clients installed on my Curve. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, so I’ve kept them all rather than choosing just one.

iHeartRadio is a little different from the other two, so I’ll mention it first. The BlackBerry version has about 150 stations to choose from, including major-market and medium-sized market “real” stations as well as Internet radio stations. If you are living far away from your hometown, this is great. That is, if your hometown stations are included. Currently there is just one station from Honolulu, which would not be my first choice to listen to when there, but it’s ok and nice to be able to get it in the car here in Chicago. My old van did not have an AUX jack for music players, but my new one of course does, and one of my first purchases was the cable to connect music players to the car stereo.

Slacker and Pandora are similar in many ways. Each one allows you to create your own custom stations by choosing artists or songs that you want to listen to. For legal/licensing reasons, neither one is available outside North America nor do you have 100% on-demand choice of music. With Slacker, you choose up to 15 artists for your custom station, and most of the music selected will be by those artists or by artists very similar in style. With Pandora, you choose one artist or song and Pandora takes it from there to create your station using the Music Genome Project to choose artists and songs that you should enjoy based on your original input. Both allow you to ban artists or songs that you do not want to hear again, and favorite those that you do.

I have been a fan of Pandora for a while and often have it running on my desktop computer at work. Their BlackBerry client came out just this week, so I don’t have a lot of time with it yet. One feature that the BlackBerry version of Slacker has that I have found invaluable is the ability to cache stations. This means that I can listen to these stations even in areas where I don’t have a good signal.

The free version of Slacker has audio advertisements (about 1 an hour); the free version of Pandora has visual advertisements (so far, all for Docker that I’ve seen). I haven’t yet felt the need to upgrade to the paid versions of either service. The free versions are that good (sorry, Slacker and Pandora).

Any other BlackBerry users out there? Would love to hear your thoughts on these, and anything else I haven’t tried yet!

Musical surprises (24 of 30/90 of 274)

Mobile music (19 of 31/54 of 274)