I've been trying out the new music service Pandora and I'm really liking it (mostly). I like the service, I guess it's the delivery that bugs me.
The interface is slick and relatively easy and intuitive to use. The selection of music it served it with only the limited parameters I started it with (Counting Crows) was impressive. Initially. the ratio of songs I liked vs. disliked was something like 5:1, which was acceptable for me. It got better as I voted on what was served up, tuning things more to my liking.
The issue I had was that it just ground to a halt after a while. After I got about a minute or so into a song it would stutter and then there were big wait times, 10 seconds or so of music, another pause, more music. You get the picture. There was even a point where I would get to hear a bit of a song, a few pauses and stutters and then it would skip to the next one.
It was like the bad old days of Real Audio. So I had to shut it off. I guess the service is being flooded by thousands of others all trying out the service just like me. I'll wait it out and give it another shot when the growing pains subside I guess.
The cool thing is that Pandora CTO Tom Conrad is blogging, so I'll keep an eye on what he has to say as things evolve. Straight from the CTO to me. Cool. I love blogging for stuff like this.
In the meantime I'm going back to Launch, a service I used to use a while ago that has now been picked up by Yahoo!. When did that happen? Did I just not notice? No bandwidth problems here. Here is the link to Launch and the Canadian Launch site with 200% more Tragically Hip and Anne Murray.