Category: Jam Session
I've been playing with all of these websites and their iDevice apps for the last couple of weeks and wanted to see not only who else used any of these sites, but what you think of them as far as variety of music, accessibility of website versus app, etc. For those of you who don't know, with each of these services, you type in the name of any artist and it'll start playing songs not only by that artist but by similar artists. All of them seem to have well-stocked music libraries, so you're not stuck with nothing but all the hottest electronic disco artists of the past week and a half. I listen to music that's decades old, and they have at least some of it. You can put in a really essoteric artist, like Moondog or the Residents or Focus or Steeleye Span and can get interesting results. So, any thoughts? Have any of you played with all three and compared them? Which do you think is best overall?
I've messed around with all three on my desktop, don't have a phone with the aps for them.
They all have pro's and con's attacned with them.
I've messed around with all three on my desktop, don't have a phone with the aps for them.
They all have pro's and con's attacned with them.
I generally work out to Pandora but for workouts I really want the heavy metal stuff mostly.
I started out with a Jango but found it frustrating at work on the desktop. Now that there's a mobile app I do find it quite interesting. Never tried Last.Fm.
The two I have tried do have a lot of my musical tastes, including the extremely dark industrial type stuff, such as Coil, Current 93, Death in June, Nurse With Wound and the like. That stuff isn't for everybody and can cause the easily frightened to think one disturbed if they hear it so nice to have that pipe direct to the headphones.
I had to delete the last.fm app. My impression is that you have to pay them to play tracks on your iDevice. Now, I'd gladly pay them if they were the only game in town or were otherwise unique, but since Pandora and Jango will let you play stuff for free, although there are occasional ads, which is OK, I figured I didn't need the last.fm app, and the website will let me play stuff if I would rather listen on the PC.
Thanks, Leo, for the mentions of those bands. I know a tiny bit about that stuff although I have to be in the right frame of mind to listen to it. That was a side of music I didn't test with either of these services. So far I found Non and Psychic TV on Jango, and I'm beginning to believe they have the smaller library between them and Pandora. I still like their app, and it actually seems to respond when you thumb-up or thumb-down stuff. In Pandora I'm never sure if my ratings take.
I had Pandora for several months, but I noticed that it got too repetitive for my taste, and it made some odd choices in my artist stations. I messed around with Jango a little bit, but I wasn't really impressed with that either. The app I currently use, which I feel is majorly underrated, is Slacker Radio. It has over 200 stations in many categories and genres, and they are created by human beings, not computers. You can also create stations and playlists by artist or song, respectively. The difference is that you choose all the artists or songs on the station or playlist by typing in their names, adding them, and browsing similar artists or songs. It seems to have a much larger library than Pandora. It's free with ads or $3.99 without, as Pandora is.
How accessible is the last.fm site? I've heard good things about it, but have never tried it, since I know how generally useless the Pandora site is. I paid the $10 and got Hope, and I don't regret it at all. That seems like a reasonable enough price for a program that will get me into new bands that I might not have heard of before.
It's hard for me to just tell somebody a site is accessible because I may not use the same combo of browser and screen reader they do and you can get different results. I'll tell you this. Last.fm seems to play nicer with Internet Explorer and System Access than it does with NVDA and Firefox. No idea what results JFW or Window-Eyes will give you. You can play with the site without having to sign up, I think, so I'd get in there and mess around with it.
still think yahoo's old launchcast plus for 99 a year was the best thing I have ever used. Sucks that is 07 it went away.
The ap I use is called songza. Instead of putting in an artist and getting similar artists, you can choose from categories. Now, I don't just mean genres, though you can choose those too, you can choose from moods, and they have nearly a hundred moods, or activities. You want music to work out to, make out too, strip too, camp too, sit around and do nothing too, just pick the activity you want from the list of dozens. Plus, everything is accessible. It even suggests playlist depending on what day it is and what time of day it is. Its a great little app, and its free.
I think Songza is a pretty unique concept. I didn't decide to include it in the original post just because it's made up of pre-defined human-built playlists. That being said, though, they do play a wonderful variety of things and you can really focus on a particular subgenre if you like. I like the idea of having playlists available to match moods or activities.
I like jango. I run it on my pc with jaws and they send out e-mails with a lot of good suggested play lists. I would like to get the jango ap for the iphone. Apparently you have to transfer the ap from the pc to the iphone. How do I do this?