Hi gang, I listen to all of these, and here are my comparisons:
Pandora - My favorite, but it has some quirks. It has a huge supply of artists and generally creates a nice station from a suggestion. Here are the quirks though: - Limited supply of music per station. Once I get it tuned if I listen to a station a lot I get a lot of repeats. - Prioritizes era over similarity. For example, when I seed "Neil Young" I get a ton of 1970's artists such as Jimi and The Who by default. This is crazy and wrong - I want music that sounds like Neil Young, not music on the radio at the time his biggest hits were popular. He has had about 20 albums since then. This is a major failing of Pandora and contrary to their story. - A Jack Johnson seed creates a station filled with improvisational jazz, even after killing every instance of it. When I want Chick Corea, I'll create a station for him. Slacker - As broad coverage as Pandora, and it creates very different stations from the same seeds. It doesn't have the era bug and the variety is broader and I'm listening to Slacker more and more. The downside - it has audio ads in the stream. They are often mixed to be louder than the music and it's disturbing. I'd listen more to it if they just mixed down the volume of the ads. Last.FM - I listen occasionally but when I do it's great. I have the free account so I only listen to the "Recommended" station but it's usually quite good, better than the Quickmix on Pandora. I scrobble both iTunes and my iPods, and Squeezecenter so it knows me pretty well. Genius - When I'm listening to iTunes I usually use Genius instead of Party Shuffle now. It has the same era bug as Pandora - when I select any classic rock song I only get classic rock suggested, but it's often much better than that. It's good for a more eclectic mix when using non-classic rock songs. I never got MusicIP to work. How do others feel? -- EyeRonik1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ EyeRonik1's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=20292 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=59872 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
