Musical rantings

My iPod died the other day. For most, this would be a time of mourning, followed soon thereafter by fevered clicking on the apple store's website to pick a successor. Not so for me. In addition to being smarter and prettier than I am, Janie is also more frugal. So I'm working on taking both of our iPods (mine's battery is gone, Janie's hard drive is borked), and combining them into a single, unholy FrankenPod! I'll post about it once it's happened. But that's not what this post is about. Since I've been without my music, I've been forced to search for other alternatives. I tried Yahoo's launch cast service, but soon became annoyed by their reliance upon IE (couldn't get Firefox to work with it), and their lack of choices. So I tried another service I had heard about but hadn't messed with much, Pandora. Pandora is interesting in that, instead of choosing from a list of radio stations, you create your own, by telling Pandora about the music that you like. It's dead simple. You tell Pandora that you like, say, Muse, or Ladytron, and Pandora says 'Great, here's some music by these folks you like, and here's some that we think you'll like, since they share some traits!' The whole thing is part of the music genome project, which attempts to classify music down to it's bare essentials, and that idea powers the suggestions you get. It's allowed me to find some music that I hadn't heard before that I enjoy quite a bit. If you build a station you like, share it with friends, learn about their musical tastes and predilections. Try this link to listen to Scotty Radio.