neurological dryer lint

so i've raved about pandora in the past. lately after hearing lots of comparisons of pandora to last.fm i figured i'd give last a shot. it's certainly much more of a commitment than pandora, which allows you to just show up, throw in a few band names, and listen to a stream of music from the flash app in your browser window.

last.fm goes at it from a much more community-involved angle - they incorporate a myspace-ish atmosphere of groups of fans of a particular band or genre... and while there is the ability to simply show up to their site and throw some band names in and get a custom station, the best experience listening to it requires that you download their player app (hey, front-and-center authenticated HTTP proxy support, awesome).

i think all of the community feedback of the fairly inconsistent, subjective connections between bands will make for a more personal, complete experience than you get with pandora, whose recommendations often ignore very subtle differences between genres... it's assumed with pandora that, hey, you like megadeth, that means you like slayer and tool and a hundred other new-metal bands like seether and cold and whatnot.

last.fm seems to 'get' the bizarre nuances of my taste a little better. someone that listens to sublime and weezer and jimmy eat world and sunny day real estate and further seems forever will also enjoy nas and biggie and jimmy buffett and straylight run and sinatra. huh. that's not too strange, in fact, it's more common than not. i find myself rarely skipping songs while tuned into last, which was not the experience with pandora.

that's to be expected, though, with the extensive customization potential in last. their selling point to getting an account is a plugin for your media player (itunes, WMP, winamp) to pipe the titles of the stuff you listen to up to their servers to effortlessly (besides the 95% CPU utilization of the plugin) populate your preferences into their database. so last night i fired up itunes before i went to bed, put it on random, and just played from my library all night, and this morning when i awoke 180 songs had been added to my DB. perfect.

i'm still exploring everything they have to offer, but it looks like i'm shuffling away from pandora for the time being.