I input the Dictators. So far it's played them, the Meat Puppets, and the Flesh Eaters. Nothing I haven't heard before, but good choices.

Wow, that's pretty ambitious. I'll have to try it at home, where I've got speakers, but based on what it spit out as suggestions for Andrew Bird, I'm intrigued.

That's the problem I've had with it so far. It tells me all the really obvious stuff that I'd like based on my preferences. But using it just now, they must've tweaked it a bit because I'm getting some good stuff that I hadn't heard before. It's looking like the key to getting good stuff is sticking to new music. Something like the Dictators is going to give you a lot of stuff that is from that time period and well, if you like The Dictators you probably know the other stuff that you'd like from that period. It also helps if you aren't obsessed with music.

Stuff stuff stuffy stuff stuff. I like stuff and stuff.

Get stuffed, dude ;>

I added Springsteen to my list of artists. They kicked off with "Roulette." Admirable choice.

After inputting "the chills"

To kick things off, we'll start with a typical song of theirs featuring mellow rock instrumentation, mild rhythmic syncopation, repetitive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping and mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation.

Sweet! Pink Frost, my favourite song of theirs.

Great idea, but my experience back during the beta (and again this morning) is that it's really quite terrible at the job, at least when it comes to electronic music.

With rock I found that it was semi-competent, but not very imaginative.

I tried to load up some trip-hop-ish downtempo, and it cut to 2-step, big beat, progressive trance and finally glitch before I switched to iTunes for the soundtrack.

Interesting. I wonder/hope if it will "learn" from having lots of users.

My favorite was when my girlfriend created the Elvis radio station and the third selection offered was Air Supply.

I tried it, and it was very frustrating to me -- I wanted songs like "Maps" and "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl", two songs that have a very specific emotional note -- and while the music I got was vaguely compatible, none of it was anything like either of those songs, or about the same sort of desperate longing. Personally hitting the emotional notes is more important to me than hitting the musical notes, and Pandora only seems to do the latter.

mmahaffie, as far as I understand, it doesn't learn at all -- the genomes are created manually through the MGP. This is only a front end. It's got some interest for me, but I'll stick with my Last.FM.

Does it have a setting for "More Cowbell"?

maybe i missed it, but will it display a set list, rather thqn just the past few songs?

stilicho I think you are right about how the system works but I find that pandora has a vastly larger amount of music than lastfm whice seems very limited. I just seem to get the same few songs over and over.

arse, first, with your profile I can see you might like stuff that Last.FM is understandably weak in (blues, 80s). I'm not sure what you're playing there, though -- if it's personal radio, with so few tracks, you're going to have a limited playlist. Mine didn't start to open up until I'd listened to 1000+ tracks. Also, if you explore various group, similar artist, or tag radio stations, you can definitely listen to stuff outside your profile.

I'm not shilling for Last.FM, it can be free after all, so much as group stats. ;-) Just trying to help, you know.

Here's mine.

stilicho, yeah, I did some digging around and found that. Still interesting, though. I tend to like the kind of connections that Pandora seems to be making -- sonic similarity, instrumentation and the like -- I'll give it a chance.

I will say, though, that my first station "Grateful Dead" offered me an Archies song about 5 or 6 in. Unexpected, but not unpleasant.