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Getting the best songs out of Pandora


kve777

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I've been using Pandora for about 2 weeks, at work. In the shop, I cannot get satellite or FM signals at all. I've been getting bored with the same songs no matter if I put in Pink Floyd or Traffic or Neil Young. I finally hit it! Frank Zappa! Yup. You wanna hear all the good stuff hidden away at Pandora, tune to FZ. Lots of Frank and Dweezil, plus King Crimson, early Pink Floyd, Jeff Beck, all kinds of cool songs. Try it!

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  • 1 month later...

Yeah, lots of the FZ that's played on Pandora is "Strictly Commercial"; but yes, it will play more variety than the mainstream artists. I was having trouble with Fleetwood Mac playing every 3 songs (with regular repeats of the same song), finally I had to start putting in "don't like" tags so it would stop playing them so much.

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I don't know what it is with Pandora but it does seem to get stuck on certain artists even when you try to lead it elsewhere. I prefer to just use a 128 gig memory stick, MP3's ripped at a decent rate are better than Pandora anyway if not exactly "high fidelity". I rip everything to MP3 because that's the only format my truck will play and it's fine for driving.

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One of my go to' s on Pandora is Assembly of Dust. Good clean recordings for the most part and alot of different instruments and plenty of dynamics. Little Feat etc. cruise through giving you ideas for another station. A lot of songs work well with SH.

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My Roku enabled Sony TV sends audio from Pandora, YouTube, Amazon, etc. via Toslink to the Carver C1000a. I just put it on "mix" to play random from all of the Pandora stations I have. Sometimes it gets stuck playing certain artists, but if it does I use the skip to next song function and/or quit and re-start the player.

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  • 7 years later...

It seems I have one of two music modes:

 

*I have an earworm for a specific artist and want to queue up their entire discography…

*I have no idea what I want to listen to and will gladly hand the controls to someone else.

 

I can be in ‘the shop’, in the office or chilling in the living room. I can be decisive or indecisive anywhere. 
I guess it all depends on my mental state at the time and what I’m doing.

 

When I know exactly what I want to listen to, I tune into my Tidal account and queue up the discography of whatever artist I fancy. This is by far my favorite thing about being able to stream anything that crosses my mind.

 

When I’m undecided, I tune into one of the self-curated stations I have created on Pandora. (I’ve had a paid subscription for over a decade)

These vary from ‘Classic Rock’ (From Aerosmith to ZZ Top)

to ‘Crooners’ (Sinatra, Etta James, Tony Bennet, etc)

to blues (Howlin’ Wolf, BB King, etc)

to a few stations with jazz of differing flavors.

I have a dozen or so stations created.

 

When indecisiveness has completely taken over, I can shuffle them all.

-this usually does not work for me-

 

Pandora more recently added some ‘modes’ - sub-stations, if you will, I think each station.

Discovery, Deep Cuts, Newly Released and Crowd Favorites.

For me, this has served fairly well to add variety to my playlists.

In my experience, to get the best out of my stations, I add (and sometime remove) artists to the station feeds.

Ya gotta give the algorithms something to work with after all. 😉

I will occasionally pull up one of their curated stations. Not very often though, and I really can’t state why.

 

Pandora does offer an upgraded subscription which is more like Spotify, etc, where you can listen to anything you want when you want. I tried it for a while but I did like Tidal better.

This experiment did reveal something quite unexpected though.

On Pandora, I heard a song from an, unknown to me, artists that really grabbed my ear.

I switched to the other ‘mode’ to pull up the album to explore more.

I was greeted with a message, something about this album was only licensed for radio play. WTF?!

Switched over to Tidal, and it is not available there either.

I’ve tried to pull this album up on Qobuz too, to no avail.

Licensing nuances I guess.

 

For me, Pandora is a good compliment to other streaming services. In my world it is essential.


There you have it, my $.02. I can make change… 

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2 hours ago, xavionics said:

On Pandora, I heard a song from an, unknown to me, artists that really grabbed my ear.

I switched to the other ‘mode’ to pull up the album to explore more.

I was greeted with a message, something about this album was only licensed for radio play. WTF?!

Switched over to Tidal, and it is not available there either.

I’ve tried to pull this album up on Qobuz too, to no avail.

Licensing nuances I guess.

Hey Lee, 

 

When I encounter this..., (not on pandora, but in other parallel examples of licensing restrictions on content I am seeking) ..., I log on using my VPN, and pretend I live in Germany, or Sweden, or?  Often, in cases like these, but not always, the content available varies by differences and nuances in licensing laws from country to country.  In other words, Tidal originated in Sweden/Norway, where thinking about digital rights is slightly different.  Access Tidal via VPN can sometimes present different content.

 

Another interesting possibility..., is to look into P2P sharing using Emule.  Way more than I can share on that..., and I'm not an expert, and there is some religion around how it's used, and abused..., but the Emule project has evolved in the last 20 years (based on the Edonkey original incarnation)... But finding esoteric, hard to find, or can't get it on Tidal/Qobuz tracks is often found from a P2P access.  If you find the artist and track, and in the format that you are looking for, adding it to your hard disk drive for your own personal index of music becomes possible.  If you are not familiar with Emule..., best to read up on it in Wikipedia, then go from there, if it is interesting to you (or another reader of this post). eMule - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMule .

 

...again, I'm not an expert on either of these - just some minor experience to satisfy my curiosity, from time to time.

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Thanks for the insight AJ!

you are far closer to being an expert than I am…😎

 

in the particular case in point, I bought the CD. (Reminds me, there are a couple others I want to order)

 

The VPN idea is something I hadn’t considered but I should - for a number of reasons. Thanks!

 

I have to admit I won’t go the P2P route. My sister is a published songwriter and, should I say, enlightened me back in the Wild West days of Napster. But that’s just me, to each his own.

 

Bottom line: when I think back to the 70s when we borrowed albums and recorded them to cassette, having the ability to pick what we want when we want and just play it still amazes me. And I am thankful for it!

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