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Brian Enos's Forums... Maku mozo!

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I've had a Sirius radio for years and it's on in my office whenever I am there. But the fact is that they have gotten into a real rut with their stations, playing the same stuff every day. So, I decided to finally dump it and try something different.

I spent a week listening to various stations on Pandora Free and decided that there was enough stuff I liked to give it a go. One thing in particular I was drawn to is the ability to create custom stations by combining several different groups. Pandora does a fairly decent job of finding a selection of similar music.

They also have a PC desktop app as well as apps for iPad, iPod, Android, and Windows Phone (plus a couple more I may have overlooked).

Subscriptions to the paid service are cheap enough to give it a run for a while and see if I like it or not. Anyone have any interesting suggestions for music to add to my collection. Bear in mind that this is music to work to. I'm 65 and if you mention Heavy Metal, Hip Hop, or Justin Bieber, I will ridicule you to no end.

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I use the free version - and like it, especially is you have adblock on

If it does try to play a bieber or perry song, the 'thumbs down' seems to keep those at bay

I started trying some of the other 'decade' stations' then I'd add groups form the 60s/70s/80s that I had forgotten about - to my own station - gives me a good eclectic mix

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I have been an loyal Pandora listener for years and that is where the music will be coming from if you get into any issues of my cars. I am tried Sirius but not having the ability to skip bar songs and the surprising amount of DJ chatter made it a poor experience for me. For $3 a month for the ad free version Pandora has been money well spent. My newest car even has native Pandora app integration with the touch screen so I can switch stations or give something the thumbs down without having to go to my phone.

As for stations that you might appreciate the Led Zeppelin station is one of my favorites.

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One thing I did notice for the first time yesterday is that some of what they play are live versions of songs. I've got nothing against live music but if it can be a distraction when you are working along and a familiar song comes on that is not familiar. The first I noticed was Otis Redding "Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay." Drove me nuts that the tempo and phrasing wasn't the one I'd heard a million times.

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Yeah, with very few exceptions the live versions get a big thumbs down from me.

What bothers me about that is how the thumbs down works. It's a bit confusing but giving the same artist a thumbs down for two songs in the same station will remove that artist from that station (for you).

Still a lot to learn.

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From Pandora:

>>

If you give a "thumb-down" to a live version of a song, you will not hear that version again on

the station you're listening to. This will not keep the studio version of that track from playing,

and doesn't necessarily mean that you will no longer hear other songs by that artist.

As always, you should use your thumb ratings freely to tell Pandora what you want and don't want to hear.

<<

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It's hopefully, a fairly intelligent algorithm, that figures you like that song, you probably like others from that artist, and others 'like' that artist. My experience.. maybe 4-6 months, it's pretty good.. expect for the live versions mentioned already.. I'm trying to whittle those out. Use the free version for a while.. you'll see pretty quick how it matches

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When you like (thumbs up) a song, will Pandora reply that song, or other songs from that artist?

As I understand it, a thumbs up helps the program narrow down what you like. It should mean that you will hear more songs by that artist and similar artists.

I've been reading about creating stations and one of the ways you can tailor it is to start with one artist and then click the Add Variety button and start adding other artists. There is also a way to create a station starting with a single song and then adding to that but I haven't explored that yet.

Right now, I'm in the process of just creating stations based on particular artists and seeing what Pandora comes up with. I'm not sure what the algorithm uses for data but it has to be extremely extensive. I'm finding songs show up that I never would have thought of but that fit quite well. It's quite interesting.

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I did a pandora station with the Dropkick Murphys. And it has generated a pretty good mix of Celtic Punk and Celtic type music including traditional Irish and Scottish folk tunes. My only sown side is when I try to buy some artists work, they are not on iTunes, so I have to hunt them up elsewhere. Pandora has also thrown in some ringers, trying to blend my stations (Cash on the Crux Shadows and Otis Reading on the DKM).

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I did a pandora station with the Dropkick Murphys. And it has generated a pretty good mix of Celtic Punk and Celtic type music including traditional Irish and Scottish folk tunes. My only sown side is when I try to buy some artists work, they are not on iTunes, so I have to hunt them up elsewhere. Pandora has also thrown in some ringers, trying to blend my stations (Cash on the Crux Shadows and Otis Reading on the DKM).

Clearly your choice in music sucks which is the reason you are having so much trouble. Why not try something more hip like "The Backstreet Boys" mixed with "Polka Time". It's what all the cool kids are listening to. :goof:

Seriously, the fact that all this kind of mashup can be done is rather remarkable.

It rather puts me in mind of a day long discussion I had with some other data guys and a couple government types back in the late 80's about the huge amount of world wide data that was available (and this was pre-internet hacking) and ways to capture it all and do correlations. Believe it or not, there was actually a pilot program at the *** with a bunch of people scanning newspapers from around world for key words and phrases and entering them into a Lotus Magellan (I think) database. I came into this because I was working testing a database program called CrossView which could create multidimensional data arrays. Both products failed because there were only a handful of people who could find any use for them.

The only reason I bring this up is that what those programs were doing then is what eventually lead to things like Google and Pandora. You never know where some idea is going to go given some time.

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I found this interesting article on thumbs up versus thumbs down:

http://awesomania.com/2011/07/18/how-to-get-pandora-to-play-exactly-what-you-want/

That's a very interesting take on it. Of course there are other blogs that say you have to do both or it won't know what you like. And a few that say only Thumbs Up stuff you really like and skip (rather than Thumbs Down) stuff you don't like.

By messing around with some artist as starting points and seeing what that gets me, I'm starting to narrow down a few artists that give me stuff I really like with almost no clinkers. My next step is to start adding some of these together.

One I've had a lot of success with (remember my age) is Steely Dan Radio. I've had this on in the office for the past couple days and don't think I've run into one song I didn't like.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just a quick update, for the past week or so, I've had Pandora tuned to Smooth Jazz Radio in the mornings. I listened to a similar station on Sirius mornings and the Pandora station is 1000% better! The variety is huge with a ton of stuff I never heard before. I suspect that the main difference is that Pandora is playing every track on an album while Sirius was just working from a play list - which is why stuff repeated so often it got stale.

I've continued to play around with building my own station by adding artists to Steely Dan Radio and am finding it's not quite as straight forward as I first thought. While I may like a particular artist, I may not care so much for other artist and songs that end up on the play list by adding them to my list. I have the feeling that it's largely because I am not taking into account everything that Pandora does.

For those fellow dweebs who find this sort of thing interesting, Pandora is based on something that they call the Music Genome Project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project Genome may not be an accurate term to describe this but it does go WAY beyond something as simple as genre and tempo. I'm not sure how many people they have working on this but it does produce some rather interesting mashups.

For example, I was messing around over the weekend with something that was rock based but was largely smooth, melodic, not too fast, etc - IOW a rock version of the Smooth Jazz genre that would be good office work music. Right in the middle of all this, I found myself listening to "Stairway to Heaven". I have to admit that it did sort of fit but Led Zepplin is not a band I would have added to this list.

Edited by Graham Smith
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  • 7 months later...

Anyone have any favorite stations on Pandora?

I like music from the (late) 60s to today.. pretty eclectic (no boy bands, katy perry, justin beeper! - lol)

The stations I seem to find, seem to have few songs and just keep repeating them

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Created a Ventures (Walk Don't Run) channel, added Dick Dale, LInk Wray. it added Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, Joe Maphis, Les Paul. I have to give the Thumbs Down when they try to put 80's Disco/Funk into the mix.

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  • 5 months later...

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