Solo Technology

I first mentioned Last.FM and Pandora in an article I wrote last November. Since that article I’ve continued to experiment with and use both services. Both have such great ways of hearing music I like, but also constantly discovering new bands, new genres or even albums by known bands that I missed along the way. Great stuff.

In a nutshull, to use Pandora you “feed” it groups or songs you like and it plays you songs that it feels match your seed items. Last.fm, on the other hand, keeps track of what you’re playing (and ideally, how you tagged it) and once you’ve played enough begins to suggest songs from neighbors that match up. Both are really cool ways to find songs.

[Here's my profile stuff from last.fm]

And now I know I wasn’t the only one listening to Pandora and wishing that it worked with last.fm’s song tracking. A guy by the name of Gabe Kangas whipped up this slick little mashup of the two services to do just that — play Pandora and track it with last.fm. He calls it PandoraFM and while not the prettiest thing in the world… it works and it works quite well.

What’s really neat about this is that although Gabe originally did it without sanction, Pandora has actually “opened up” their API to him to help make it a better product. And that is pretty darned cool and open-minded of them, don’t you think? From Gabe’s blog:

I was contaced by Pandora a while back wanting to work with me on this. The wanted to enable the same functionality we’ve had all this time, but without the ‘hack’ factor. They created a flash component that now runs on the new version that enables me (or you!) to get that information directly from the source and know what’s going on within the Pandora tuner application.

Plus now when they change the url of the flash app on pandora.com I don’t any longer have to scramble the next morning and change it on this side So this is all very good things, and it’s quite exciting.

One minor bummer - doesn’t seem to work well with Opera. *sigh*

[via TechCrunch]

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