- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 21 reviews Back to product review
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Better *music* programming than my subscription satellite radio â?? and itâ??s free!"
Pros: The "Music Genome Project" allows a listener to genetically engineer his or her own perfect commercial-free radio station.
Cons: The tools for producing a truly customized, tweaked, and refined personalized station are less intuitive and could be better explained to new users.
Summary: I am a Sirius Satellite Radio subscriber. I love it for the road and the non-music stations, but when I am at home, and I want to listen to music â?? I go to my personalized Pandora station.
Iâ??m a fan of older jazz, blues, swing, ballads, and standards. The Pandora projects music library constantly impresses me. I also personally believe that the Music Genome Project system does a better job of classifying and identifying the various â??genesâ?? of Jazz than it does of other musical forms. I know my Jazz stationâ??s recommendations tend to be more spot-on than those of my Rock station.
The biggest trouble with Pandora is that they do not do a very good job of explaining how to use their â??music genome projectâ?? to truly tweak and customize a personal station. The C/Net editorâ??s review is a perfect example:
[QUOTE]"This is an imperfect system, since it's hard--if not impossible--to build a perfect set of "sounds like" algorithms. For instance, creating a station for Gillian Welch will render a plethora of the expected folk/country-tinged singer-songwriter ballads, but annoyingly, almost all of them will be by women. Presumably, a listener who likes Gillian Welch would also like, say, Will Oldham, Bob Dylan, Vic Chestnut, and so on--you get the point.â??[END QUOTE]
The fact is itâ??s actually pretty easy to build a perfect set of â??sounds likeâ?? algorithms, unfortunately Pandora did a crappy job of explaining how to do it to new listeners. Most listeners, like the reviewer, will just follow the â??quickstartâ?? method of entering a single song or artist. This will produce an alright blend of music, but as the C/Net reviewer noted it is not very accurate and can produce unfortunate side-effects such as the all-female singers problem. The trouble is the service only allows you to open a new station using that simpler single song/artist interface. You then need to, less intuitively, right click that single song/artist station, and select â??edit stationâ??, to get to the REAL customizing interface for your station.
Once you have the edit station screen open you can do a much better job of defining your personalized radio station. From here you can add MULTIPLE song and artist seeds to your stationâ??s algorithm. This would have allowed the C/Net reviewer to create a station based on a seed of both Bob Dylan and Gillian Welch, thus solving his problem.
