By WALT ZWIRKO / WFAA-TV
Last month, I told you about the new Grace Wireless Internet Radio that has replaced my old clock radio. It lets me tune in a virtually unlimited variety of radio stations from around the world. I love it.
But one person wrote in to chide me for failing to mention what he considered to be the most alluring feature of this radio: Pandora.
Pandora is a little bit hard to pigeonhole. Yes, it's another Internet music radio station, but it doesn't play the same songs for everybody. That's because it's truly interactive; tell it what you like as you listen and it will play music that is tailored to your musical tastes.
It's almost chilling how accurately Pandora can deliver a stream of music from its library of half a million tunes that sounds like it could be coming from your turntable (or CD player or iPod).
I enjoy listening to "smooth jazz" music that disappeared from the local airwaves when The Oasis was silenced three years ago (it lives on if you have an HD Radio, and you can also hear it on the Internet with a computer, but, alas, not on my Grace radio).
I am now able to concoct an Oasis-like experience using Pandora.
And because I can orchestrate the sound by giving a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on what Pandora plays, my station is (at least to my ears!) much closer to what I enjoy hearing.
The reason it works so well is because Pandora breaks down each song into hundreds of musical attributes, so its computers can easily match up the songs I like with other tunes that share similar signatures.
This is not a new idea.
Pandora's Music Genome Project has been working on the technology since 2000, and there are competitive services like Slacker that are based on a similar concept.
But I find Pandora's free service hits just the right notes, with a minimum of banner ads on its computer-based player and infrequent (and brief) audio ads between songs. Only the audio ads appear when using my Internet radio because of its limited display capabilities.
My Grace Internet radio does lets me interact with Pandora by sending "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" feedback via its front panel buttons. It's not as easy as clicking your mouse on the computer-based player (and you don't have to do it), but it does help ensure that what you hear adheres to your musical tastes.
You can skip songs that you don't like, but Pandora puts a limit on how many times you can hit the button; that encourages you to actively participate in the song preferences feature. But it doesn't take long before Pandora "learns" what you really want to hear; you'll find a diminishing need to click the skip button.
You can even "bookmark" songs as they are being played for later reference.
The free Pandora service has a 40-hour monthly limit; you'll have to cough up 99 cents for unlimited listening beyond that (although you'll automatically get another 40 free hours the next month). There is also a $3 monthly Pandora service (billed at $36 per year) that offers no-limit listening along with a higher quality audio feed and no ads. (I've been happy with the free version so far.)
To help pay the bills, Pandora makes it easy for you to purchase and download any music that strikes your fancy from Amazon and iTunes (here's where the bookmarking feature comes in handy); Pandora gets a small cut from the transaction and you discover new music.
You'll feel a real sense of power when you "program" your own radio station. When Internet radio is available in your car (as I predict it soon will be), it's likely to change broadcasting in a big way.