Kris Khaira

I’ve been listening to music on Pandora lately. It’s like Last.FM but different — instead of depending on social recommendations for music, you are recommended music based on its characteristics. I love this because I’ve tried Last.FM and found that people who like jazz, rap or rock also love music I don’t. Steve Krause has a better comparison of these two services based on the the nature vs nuture debate.

Another reason I prefer Pandora is because Last.FM skips. It could be because I’m listening from Malaysia but it’s something I hope Last.FM can fix in the future.

And then came PandoraMan

Pandora doesn’t have a Cocoa based player but someone has made a Cocoa wrapper called PandoraMan. It’s just a wrapper using the Safari framework and contains nothing but the Pandora Flash player. There are no other extras, but it makes Pandora feel more like a desktop app.

Oh, and it took me only 10 seconds to sign up from inside the Flash player itself. Bliss!

By the way, if you’re wondering what “R&J” in the screenshot means, it’s rap and jazz — two genres of music I love. I made that radio by adding Talib Kweli and then adding one of the songs that turned up after searching for “jazz”.