Today I stumbled across Finetune, a service I could swear I’ve used before, which is a service pretty similar to Pandora. Pandora has never been useful to me, as it is only open to the United States. Finetune doesn’t seem to have any such restrictions.
Finetune is a service which allows you, simply, to create playlists of songs you like (and to play them) whilst in the process discovering new songs. These playlists are composed from an extremely large collection of music (around 2,000,000); you simply search and add the track you want. Playlists are 45 tracks long; if you can’t fill in all of these slots, the site will fill in songs it thinks you’ll like into it. An annoying limitation, which I suspect is for legal reasons, is that you can only include 3 songs by 1 artist in any given playlist. You can also only play a song once.
An interesting social feature of the site is that playlists get given URLs which you can share. Also, finetune provide the code to embed playable playlists (which are all Flash) into sites such as MySpace or your blog:
You can also use finetune on a Wii.
The site also employs folksonomy (tagging). Users can tag artists so other users can discover them. This is a similar approach to last.fm, where the site’s admins don’t decide which category the music belongs.
Despite the fact it is very Web 1.0, the site uses frames to great effect. This allows you to browse through the site while still listening to your music.
One thing I dislike about the site is its dark interface. This doesn’t make it look that welcoming, however, it does correspond to the approach most companies besides Apple are taking to media playback. Perhaps black is the new white.
I do wonder if a service with such a large library is legal; I’m not asking any questions, though!
Tags: music, finetune, pandora, web2.0, web 2, web 2.0, web2, last.fm
I think I saw this on music web 2.0 at Techcrunch ….
I’m not bothering, with my crappy internet, I can’t stream Pandora so why bother.
i kinda like the interface, builts up on the concept Popurls brought in ,simple on black.
Finetune would be good if the music matching wasn’t so rubbish. I mean seriously, they don’t even try. At least Pandora’s got that right. Ish.
Finetune is not only about Artist Radio though, like Pandora. It is based on building playlists of all your own music and listening/sharing that. Artist Radio is just a discovery mechanism.
Pandora is radio, Finetune is more a way to build online collection of all your favorite music, making it available to you where ever you are. While they seem similar they are pretty different in concept.
[...] For those of you outside the U.S. who don’t have access to Pandora, Finetune looks like a promising alternative. — Gina Trapani finetune [via Webby’s World] [...]
>> Finetune would be good if the music matching wasn’t so rubbish. I mean seriously, they don’t even try. At least Pandora’s got that right. Ish.
Have to disagree… Music recommendation is hard, multi-faceted, and subjective. We use a number of approaches and some artists are better connected then others. The primary methodology here is to mine the user created playlists and tag data…. if you don’t like the recommendations you get for a particular artist then simply the act of directly programming artists together will associate them (to a small degree)… the more votes through proximity… the more related.
Pandora uses a different approach… they listen to the music and map its attributes by hand. This has merits too but to me it needs something else to really work. My experiences with it have been that a lot of the songs in a pandora playlist sound alike.
[...] For those of you outside the U.S. who don’t have access to Pandora, Finetune looks like a promising alternative. — Gina Trapani finetune [via Webby’s World] [...]
finetune is the best !
I’ve never checked out Finetune before. I’d like to see what their muic matching/recommendations come up with. It’ a tough task for a software to do, so if they can do it decently, I would definitely be impressed!
Pandora always worked well for me, but its mostly down so will try finetune now hope it works well for me.
Thanks
You want Pandora outside the U.S.?
Just install Hotspot Shield (Google it). It automatically connects you to a proxyserver in the U.S. so you can gain access to all kinds of U.S.-only stuff, like Pandora