How do you get your tunes at work?
I could use my iPhone but a don’t like to be surprised when people walk up behind me so I don’t like to wear the headphones in my office and up until a few weeks ago my Bose Sounddock wouldn’t charge my 3g iPhone and now that I got a new Sounddock that will charge it, it’s staying at home for enjoyment there. So internet radio becomes my favorite option.
Pandora
Pandora is only free for the first 40 hours you use it each month, which works out to about a week for me since I’m using it from work almost exclusively.
With Pandora, you plug in the names of a couple artists or songs you like and it puts together a playlist for you. You can refine that playlist by adding more songs and artists or giving the songs Pandora chooses to play a thumbs up or thumbs down. It learns from your actions.
Pandora has excellent audio quality, consistent volume between songs, and can figure out not to play Christmas songs outside of the Christmas season (last.fm cannot figure that out) which are the factors that make it worthwhile to use as much as possible (all 40 free hours every month).
Last.fm
Last.fm is all free all the time which is a huge plus. The only drawback to last.fm is that the sound quality isn’t great and I find I have to adjust the volume of the computer a lot to keep the songs from being too loud or too quiet.
I’ve been using last.fm since July 12, 2005 (it keeps track in my profile, I don’t remember that off the top of my head).
The reason I started using last.fm is because I’m a statistics-oholic and with the help of the Scrobble plugin it collects statistics about what you’re playing in iTunes or on your iPod and combines that with the statitics about your internet radio usage for a complete picture of your musical consumption. You can view charts of what you listen to sorted by artist, album, or track and by the last week, last 3 months, last 6 months, last year, and all time.
When I first started using last.fm it was actually called AudioScrobbler and it’s main function was that plugin. AudioScrobbler later got merged into last.fm. I’ve forgotten about the website for years at a time and it kept collecting my stats about the music I played so it’s fascinating to see the big picture of my musical tastes over the last 5 years. Fascinating like I wish I could install the plugin in my brain and keep track of all the trace bits of music I hear in stores or restaurants or other people’s cars.
Overall
To get the best of both worlds: awesome sound quality from Pandora for my 40 free hours and complete picture statistics from last.fm, I use a third party website called Pandora.fm by Real-ity for those first 40 hours. It plays the music from Pandora and logs those songs as songs listened to in last.fm. Then I switch over to last.fm for the rest of the month.
There’s only one drawback to internet radio on the whole: it’s smart and it will figure out and play your guilty pleasure songs. This xkcd comic is a very accurate representation of internet radio:
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01.26.2010 at 8:39 pm
I use Pandora at work and when I run out of time, I listen to Sirius XM online but I only have that because I have a subscription for my car. I am also a member of last.fm (http://www.last.fm/user/mari_mariposa) since 2008. Really like that service and love that it is free. I’ll have to check out Pandora.fm though. Sounds interesting.