[IP] more on Under Recommendation Engines' Hood
Begin forwarded message:
From: Rob Raisch <info@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 19, 2006 9:08:54 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Under Recommendation Engines' Hood
Dave,
My experiences with Pandora are the same as others who have reported
here. It's a incredible way to discover new music and artists within
multiple categories you define. As another who believes that once
our appreciation for new things wanes, so begins our intellectual
decline into senescence, I have been driven to purchase a lot of
music I didn't know existed before Pandora. (Age: 47)
First you create a "channel" based on an artist or song you
particularly like.
Next, Pandora presents songs from similar artists and asks you to
rate them
as either "thumbs-up" (likable) or "thumbs-down" (unlikeable).
Finally, once you have "primed Pandora's pump", you can listen to
your new
personalized streaming radio station of those songs and artists
Pandora
believes you will like. Once you discover music you wish to
purchase,
Pandora provides easy links to iTunes or Amazon.
But most interesting of all to me, Pandora is now integrated into the
wonderful Slimdevices' Squeezebox. -- http://www.slimdevices.com/
For those who have yet to discover it, the Squeezebox is a high-
performance streaming music device that receives music from any local
computer, any Shoutcast-compatible Internet radio station, or from
the Pandora service, and then converts it directly into audio for
performance on your stereo.
The Squeezebox is simple to set-up, supports WIFI (802.11b/g) out of
the box, handles many encoding formats (MP3,AAC,WMA,OggVorbis), and
is very reasonably priced. It also allows you to add one or more
server-side "plug-ins" for such things as management of personal
favorites, integration with iTunes and MusicMagic, browsing PodCasts,
creating randomized playlists, etc.
The Squeezebox's Slimserver software is free, runs on PC, MAC and
Linux, and is extremely easy to install and configure. It's written
in Perl and is completely open-source which makes it community-
supported and very easy to modify. (I've adapted its standard music
library and "playlist" features to support multiple, independent users.)
All interaction with the Slimserver happens over a skin-able web
interface allowing you to control one or more players, either the
Squeezebox device itself or the desktop Java-based "Softsqueeze"
player. You can control players separately or collectively to play
the same music on all. And finally, the Slimserver allows you to
stream any of your music to standard streaming music players (like
WinAmp) locally or over the Internet.
I have two Squeezeboxes, one for the living room stereo and another
for my bedroom. The bedroom device acts both as my background, low-
volume sleep-inducing music player and my high-volume, jarring
morning alarm clock.
Pandora's integration with the Squeezebox is only a little less
flexible as Pandora's own online player and provides a very effective
way to hear many, many new and interesting artists.
/rr
--
Rob Raisch (Techno-junkie and Internet Greybeard)
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