I often find myself vainly scanning my mp3 or CD collection looking for something new.  Every file or disc seems to be just as uninteresting as the last. So this week I went looking for a way to find new music. As this is the FreewareFrenzy, I didn’t want to spend a cent in my search. I found just what I needed with Pandora, a website with a ‘smart’ music collection that makes suggestions based on your input.

Pandora is an online app that lets you customize your musical tastes by suggesting and playing music similar to any artist you enter. To try it, I typed in “Green Day” as a favorite artist. Pandora first created “Green Day Radio” as my first custom station and then loaded songs by Green Day and Good Charlotte, as well as bands I had not heard of, such as Jettingham and Glasseater. Pandora played four songs before asking me to register. By supplying my email address, a password, Year of Birth (to verify I was over 13) and Zip Code (Pandora is open to US residents only), I had access to Pandora. The only consequence of the free version is ads that play occasionally between songs and display on the page. Though, with my various ad-blockers, I didn’t notice any page ads.

The flash based player is small and simple, showing artist, song title and album art in the center. Small buttons for play, pause, skip and volume sit along the top. Buttons for Help, Share, Account and Guide Us sit along the bottom. More on these in a moment. I should note that you can skip songs if they are not interesting to you, but I found that Pandora only allows seven skips per hour, due to licensing issues.

The all important Guide Us button lets you give Pandora feed back if you like or dislike a song. Then Pandora can filter results further to bring you only music you would enjoy. Songs in the Pandora database are analyzed on an individual basis, not by artist or album. You may find that a certain song relates to your taste, while the album or artist on the whole does not.

The Share button lets you send your customized station(s) to a friend via e-mail. You can also search for your friends shared stations with their email address, or listen to the most popular shared stations on Pandora.

The Pandora player will keep all of the previously played songs in a scrollbar, so at any time you can go back to look at what has played. Simply click on the album art, and you’ll see three buttons, a thumbs up and thumbs down to guide Pandora’s choices as well as an arrow for a menu with further options. Let’s look at these other options Pandora offers.

‘Why Did You Play This’ displays an explanation of the musical characteristics Pandora used to select a certain song for your station. Bookmark lists a song in your profile in case you find a song you want to remember. A New Station can be built from a song or artist if you find something new that you would like to hear more of. Backstage gives you information on an artist, song or album. The backstage information page will open in a new window to keep your tunes flowing while you learn about the artist and bookmark them for your profile. Using Buy links you directly to the selected album on Amazon or iTunes. I found that Amazon links came up, but the iTunes links did not load, even with the latest iTunes version installed. 

Registration allows you access to a personal profile; a place to store your song and artist bookmarks, as well as your station lists. You can create up to 100 stations catering to your favorite genres of music, excluding classical, as Pandora is still working on how to analyze that. An Add to Blog button, will generate RSS feed URLs for your stations, songs, artists, etc. You can also generate HTML to put graphics about your favorites into your blog. The Help is well made, with various FAQs and even a glossary for the various musical terms that Pandora uses to categorize music.

Overall the program is well-made. As all good freeware should be, it is simple yet effective. Not only is Pandora free, but as a web-based app, there is nothing to download. You only need to have Flash player installed in your browser. http://www.pandora.com/