A while back I wrote about the web service I was using to listen to music at work, MediaMaster.   (It’s also much better now than I imply in that blog entry — they now have a newer Flash-based browswer service that’s not slow and clunky, my main complaints before.)

But a few weeks ago, MediaMaster had an outage that made it so I couldn’t listen to my music there — what was I going to do?   Sit at my computer in silence?   Not hardly, especially since there are loud servers and an air conditioner running constantly in my office.   Go back to the ad-laden Yahoo! Music?   That lasted about an hour before I couldn’t stand it anymore and set out looking for a better alternative.

I found it in Pandora.   Like Y!M, you start out with a base song or artist that you like, then build a radio station from there.   You give thumbs up or thumbs down to songs that it plays for you and it uses proprietary “Music Genome Project” technology to figure out what characteristics of the music you like.   There are no audio or video ads to distract from the music and it doesn’t play as many unknown artists as Yahoo! Music.   There are supposedly ad-themed skins for the site that refresh every time you interact with the site (play/pause or thumbs up/down, etc.), but I never see them thanks to Adblock Plus.

I also found a cool way to control Pandora on the desktop — OpenPandora.   It’s a Windows application that lets you use keyboard shortcuts to play/pause/skip and pops up a descriptive window in the TaskBar when each song begins.   No ads there either.

Between the two services, I’m a happy man at work.   I split my time between both — MediaMaster in the morning and Pandora after lunch.   But there are a couple of things that I would change about Pandora — options for more fine-grained control.   First, they let you create different “radio stations” and run a QuickMix of any or all of your stations.   But they don’t let you give one station more weight in the mix — if you wanted to hear 5 songs from your popular music station for every one classical song, for example.   I also wish you could give one seed artist more precendence over another — I like Eric Clapton, but I like U2 more — but since I have both among my seed artists, the program pulls songs from similar artists to both Clapton and U2 at the same rate.