Pandora Scores a Hit with Classical Music Addition
Last night Pandora officially introduced their new Classical music genre.
After hundreds of hours of music analysis by the highly trained staff at Pandora, based in Oakland, CA, the company best known for the free play approach to music streaming, announced the availability of a Classical music genre into their public music discovery engine.
Held at The Regency Center on Sutter Street in SF, tonights event was a skit/performance including cast of Tim Westergren, an on-command orchestra, individual performances by an artist with an alto? recorder, an opera singer and a totally fantastic trumpet/brass artist. Open bar and Bose as sponsors rounded out the night. Bose does have some fantastic products for computer originated sound.
Pandora knows how to throw a good party, that’s certain. With ambient red and blue light party atmosphere, roving waiters, interesting people, the evening was entertaining, interesting and a wonderful chance to salute a revolutionary company.
Pandora continues to help me find the most interesting new bands, but also now let’s me discover different older, original masters of the audio arts.
Now, enjoy a few photos.
Pandora Everywhere Platform - Prototype Wifi Device
As a long time member of the Pandora listening community I had the pleasure of participating in a Pandora town hall meeting / press event last night at the SF MOMA where the company made a number of significant announcements. I had a front row seat, with Michael Arrington sitting right behind me as he pounded out TechCrunch coverage of the event on his MacBook Pro.
The event kicked off with CEO Tim Westergren providing some really detailed background about how the roots for Pandora are deeply embedded in the Music Genome Project, which Tim and two others began working on roughly 7 years ago.
The town hall meeting format allowed a large number of questions to be asked and answered by Tim, to the delight of the crowd. Some of the answers hinted that changes at Pandora will continue apace, including a discussion about some of the recent music licensing issues faced by online radio station operators as well as potential enhancements to the Pandora service. Recently the company was forced to shut off access to the Pandora service for non-USA listeners, but it sounded like the team was hard at work trying to find a way to provide the Pandora service for rest-of-world audience, potentially with the UK being the next country to regain access. One member of the audience asked about using proxy servers to bypass the new IP filtering that Pandora has put into place, and while Tim spoke to their fiduciary responsibilities to the recording industry, requiring them to attempt to block access until a legal solution was in place, it sounded as if this could be a solution for those outside the US to regain (illegal) access to the Pandora service.
The main announcement of the night focused on the unveiling of the Pandora Everywhere Platform by CTO Tom Conrad. The new platform has been in development for a year as a secret project and will provide the basis for a slew of new possibilities that Pandora can capitalize on in the future.
The Sonos partnership is interesting, but I’ve been streaming Pandora to my home stereo using my Apple Airport Express wifi for months and it works really well for me in my little apartment. The ability to stream Pandora through phones from Sprint was a welcome addition as well, but Techcrunch and others have covered all of the specific product announcements, so go there to read more.
My main interest was with the pre-announcement of a new wifi enabled portable mp3 player that is being developed in conjunction with Zing and Sansa. This rocks and I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these suckers. The product is aimed at the burgeoning metro-wifi services provided by Google and others. It will also take advantage of the coming Wi-MAX services - “WiMAX can provide broadband wireless access (BWA) up to 30 miles (50 km) for fixed stations, and 3 - 10 miles (5 - 15 km) for mobile stations”
After the presentation I asked Tom about the possibilities that a peer-to-peer system might provide to Pandora’s new wifi systems and he was cagey about this, but admitted this might help them reduce their huge bandwidth bills. So let’s all keep an eye on this. If a peer-to-peer system was implemented there are several scenarios where the Pandora music discovery system could be enhanced and I’m going to keep my fingers crossed. Anyone care to speculate about this?
Filed under Internet Audio, Tech Devices, Web 2.0 | Comment (0)Stream Pandora to your home stereo using Airport Express
As a long time advocate of Pandora there is possibly no need to expand upon my love of their discovery system. I’ve discovered more “new” bands with Pandora than any other music service out there. But I was always annoyed that I was limited to using built in PC system speakers or headphones to listen, while my default install of iTunes could stream all my iTunes music, including web radio stations, directly to my home stereo using my Airport Express.
Today I decided to do something about this situation and found a nifty piece of software that does the trick. Airfoil is available from RogueAmoeba in both Mac and Windows flavors and I had the demo software installed in less than 2 minutes and was streaming Pandora to my stereo in 3 minutes. This is not free software, but the $25 US price tag seems reasonable for the outcome. An additional upside is that Airfoil not only streams Pandora, but it streams audio from any web-page embedded audio player as well as standalone players such as RealAudio, Quicktime and many other applications.
Q: Can I stream music from Pandora to my home stereo using Airport Express?
A: Yes you can stream Pandora through Airport Express.
It should be noted that if you prefer to go with hardware for the same solution, you can do so with Squeezebox, and it’s also a solid solution, but I felt no need to buy another box (especially at $299 US) that would sit in the limited space of my audio cabinet.
Let me know if you find any other great uses for Airfoil…
——– edit 8/21/08
As an alternative to Airfoil a friend just pointed me to another really cool Pandora app that runs native on the Mac. PandoraJam has a ton of features that make the fact that it helps stream music to your home stereo almost a side-note. I suspect this would be a lot of fun to play with.
