- Quick specs
- Price: Free
- Operating system: Webware
- Date added: July 18, 2007
- Total Visits: 3,126
- Visits last week: 65
- See full specifications
- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 12 votes
See all user reviews
CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: Webware staff on August 27, 2009
Pandora is a music discovery and recommendation service that creates custom stations based on artists or individual songs. The service is powered by the Music Genome Project, a taxonomy of musical information by a team of musicians an audio analysts who have gone through a massive database of songs and categorized them based on more than 400 characteristics (among them harmony, instrumentation, and rhythm). Once you input a song, Pandora spits back a continuously-running playlist of music with similar characteristics.
Pandora is an extremely simple and easy-to-use site that requires very little information from you to sign up. The service consists of a centrally located jukebox that contains a list of previously-created stations on the left-hand side for easy access. Or you can click the Create a New Station button on the top to input a new song or artist. During playback, you have a variety of options. You can pause playback and skip tracks, as well as click thumbs up or thumbs down for the songs you do or don't like, respectively. There's also a menu button for each track that lets you move it to another station, find out why it was selected, bookmark it, or buy it from iTunes or Amazon MP3. With enough use, it can effectively introduce you to all sorts of new music, and users can really tailor radio stations based on personal tastes.
The service makes its money from advertisements that are inserted every few songs, similar to terrestrial radio stations. As with all free Internet radio services, you are subjected to skip limits during playback. However, there's a subscription option that removes the skip limits and ads, and lets users relisten to songs from the playlists. In addition the Web, Pandora is available on a variety of mobile devices, such as the iPhone, as well as home network music players, such as the Sonos. All in all, Pandora is great way to discover new tunes or just pass the time with some background music, whether you stick to the Web version, take it on the go on your phone, or pump it out to some speakers.
Publisher's description
From Pandora Media :Pandora brings the power of the Music Genome Project to everyone. It plays music you'll love--and nothing else. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings--new and old, well known and completely obscure--to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you.You can create as many "stations" as you want. And you can even refine them. If it's not quite right you can tell it so and it will get better for you. The Music Genome Project was founded by musicians and music-lovers. We believe in the value of music and have a profound respect for those who create it.
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User reviews
- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 12 votes
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
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Showing 5 of 11 user reviewsSee all 11 user reviews
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
Version: Pandora
Pros: You pick what kind of music you want to listen to! Then Pandora makes a internet radio station that plays that kind of music! Yon can have more than one internet radio station!
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
Version: Pandora
Pros: This is a great site. I can hear songs that I have not heard in years, many of which we will never hear on the radio. There have been some attempts in the past, but this is the one. I currently have 5 stations for my different music moods. One band KYUSS I now can whereas radio never played their music before:they are a great CA band or were I should say. I love this site/station. And it is free, which makes it even better.
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
Version: Pandora
Pros: This thing is both useful & fun. You set up "stations" based on an artist you like & the service tries to match with other artists according to your tastes.You can set up many stations. You can hear old music you know well, & new music you may like.No downloading is needed. There are no commercials or plugs to interrupt the flow of music, & advertising on the site is light.Songs play w/ a pic of the album cover, the album's name, & the songs & artist. You can navigate to another site & keep listening, so long as you don't close the Pandora site.
Cons: Sign-in is a bit tedious.
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Version: Pandora
"My favorite place to go for music!"
Pros: FREE!
Choose the kind of music you want by Genre, band, plus it takes related songs for the band you chose that go good with it!Cons: None at all
Summary: Awesome, I like this better than my iPod because now I can listen to music on my computer speakers while doing work, all for free.
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Version: Pandora
Pros: Good layout & variety. Easy to use. OpenPandora makes it even better by not requiring you to have a browser open all the time. Easier to use than LastFM imo. Plus, I've found more new artists/songs on here than anywhere else.
Cons: You can "Thumbs down" yourself into oblivion and end up with just a few songs repeated over and over on some stations if you don't add content.
Summary: I've started using this both at work and at home. I wish someone would get a good Linux prog going to use it at home like OpenPandora that I use at work on my Windows machine. I'm usually listening to one of my stations 12+ hours a day. Now if th... read more >>
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