A few years ago I spent many hours ripping all my music into MP3s and then setting up a web server to scan all the tags and catalogue them. While it eventually was a complete waste of time I came to appreciate what a pain it must be to set up such a thing on a  large scale.  Alongside this I have been involved in a few similar efforts for work, creating, migrating and cataloguing 2 terabytes of music files.

 

For my personal use I used to listen to LaunchCast from Yahoo. It was not the highest quality but they had a decent sized collection and the intelligence behind it seemed fairly good at offering me enough fresh material mixed in with things I actually liked. I had categorized and ranked over 18,000 songs, albums and artists on the service before they recently sold it off to CBS. This move may make sense for the service since they will always be advertisement based but it was bad for listeners who like me paid annual subscriptions to be able to skip as many songs as we wanted and to never hear an ad.

Recently I found my new music listening replacement: Pandora.

Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project, which is attempting to categorize all music across a large set of criteria to somehow create a “taxonomy of musical information.” So what does that mean to you? It means you can create a playlist for “Danzig” and pretty much anything related will start being streamed to you. You can the customize the list (I usually changed the name or started with a Genre) and seed the list with other bands or songs, etc.

The player then uses your “QuickMix,” which is just a set of playlists you choose to combine. Now mine is a bit ecclectic but it mixes them up very nicely.  Then I used one of the excellent ad ons they have which is the Windows Vista Sidebar add on. I use a 64 bit system so had to manually run the 32 bit sidebar because Flash does not support 64 bit applications (this can be run from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe” and you can easily put a desktop shortcut to manually launch the sidebar).

All in all a great and simple service that doesn’t assault you with a bunch of ads and is fairly simple to use. I really recommend this service if you need a little background music while you work.