From Journeyman to Master

So I started telecommuting for Big Fish Games today. Of course, I do it through VPN, which means I now have a US IP address. I fired up Pandora the minute I realized that fact. It’s back and works even better. The recommendations rarely miss. I guess this will offset the weird feeling I’ve been having after watching Sicko last night.

I’m just ripping Joe Satriani’s ground breaking Surfing with the alien album. Then I suddenly realized the cover art is actually the Silver Surfer from Fantastic Four. Quite a cool discovery.

Do you remember going to a concert and there are always those booths selling overpriced T-shirts or CDs? I don’t what you do but I always ignore them. So I did the same thing at the Barenaked Ladies Are Me concert last Thursday. One of my coworkers, on the other hand, stood in line and bought a USB drive. Well, that’s at least better than T-shirts for our geeks, right? The only catch is that the drive will only be available 20 minutes after the show. So he waited for 20 minutes after show. Guess what? He got a USB drive with the mp3 of the show in it! Now that’s a band who don’t give a shit about DRM and know what they can do with technology. Check out their website.

This is kind of a repost. Some of you might have read this entry from the old feed. But it doesn’t exist in the new blog yet.

I’ve been using both Last.fm and Pandora (they are two most popular music recommendation services in case you don’t already know) for a while now. I feel it’s been long enough so that I can do a little comparison.

The biggest difference between them is their music recommendation mechanism. Pandora’s recommendation, which utilizes the revolutionary The Music Genome Project, is based on the characteristic of the music. From the project’s page:

Each song in the Music Genome Project is analyzed using up to 400 distinct musical characteristics by a trained music analyst. These attributes capture not only the musical identity of a song, but also the many significant qualities that are relevant to understanding the musical preferences of listeners. The typical music analyst working on the Music Genome Project has a four-year degree in music theory, composition or performance, has passed through a selective screening process and has completed intensive training in the Music Genome’s rigorous and precise methodology and procedures. To qualify for the work, analysts must have a firm grounding in music theory, including familiarity with a wide range of styles and sounds. All analysis is done on location.

So if I like Sex Pistols, Pandora will probably recommend something like Ramones or The Clash to me. The more time you spend building your profile, the more accurate the recommendation will be. After spending some time (maybe a couple of weeks of total listening time) building my profile, it rarely disappoints me now. The only trouble I have is when it comes to hip hop music. I don’t like hip hop generally except the music by The Streets and Beastie Boys. But these two artists are considered similar to gangsta rap which I absolutely hates. This shouldn’t count as a downside because it’s just me being picky.

Last.fm’s recommendation, on the other side, is totally community based. You listen to what other people have been listening to. So if somebody likes Sex Pistols and Last.fm happens to pick my profile to make recommendation, the next song could be by Dido (yes, I do like Dido). It’s cases like this make me like Pandora more. Although Last.fm does have some features that’s missing in Pandora such as a very helpful artist Wiki.

After all these blabbing, I think I should tell you that I actually don’t use either one of them directly. That’s right. I use PandoraFM. It uses Pandora as the player and recommendation service, submits the songs you listened to Last.fm and also grabs the artist bio and other meta info from Last.fm and displays them at the bottom of the page. I guess you CAN get the best out of both worlds sometimes.

Happy listening.

This Japanese surf guitarist, Takeshi Terauchi, and his band gave classic a twist. Yes, eleven classical scores played surf style. MP3s are freely downloadable. I’ve listened to them and really like them. The page also has a link to another album of theirs, which is more traditional Japanese.

Yasuda San, I know you are watching. You should definitely check it out. Maybe you already did?