Pandora.com sounds like a simple idea: you type in the name of a piece of music you like, or the name of artist, and Pandora finds similar music. You can reject or applaud each choice, thereby increasing the chance that you'll like their next pick.

The technical details are quite interesting, but you don't need to understand any of that to appreciate Pandora (by the way, don't miss the Pandora Blog if you are interested in the "behind the scenes" look). Just go to the site, type in something you like, and it starts. Whatever you typed becomes a "station" - I started with "Rhapsody in Blue", and it gave me Stan Kenton playing "Body and Soul". I listened to a few more choices, and then created a new station for "Queen". That gave me mostly just Queen - apparently there's not a lot that is similar. With that in mind, I created "Smash Mouth", thinking that style might be hard to match, but Pandora immediately gave me "Back to the Middle" by The Pink Spiders (no, I'd never heard of them either) and then "Ride" by The Vines and I had to agree those were good matches.

You can move a particular song to a different station, bookmark it, put it on a month's hiatus (you like it but are sick of hearing it) or buy it from iTunes or Amazon.

The basic use of Pandora is free, though an inexpensive subscription gives you more capability such as being able to listen to your "stations" on your Sprint phone or listen on your home music equipment.

I was disappointed that I couldn't create a "Brahms" station. Pandora responded:

That is the limitation of Pandora: everything is hand analyzed. In a way, that's comforting: computers aren't smart enough to do this yet, at least not without human help.

I've switched back to my "Rhapsody in Blue" station as I finish this up. It's given me "Kansas City Rag" by James Scott and "Nobody Does it Better" by David Osborne, and is playing "Solace" by Scott Joplin now. Nice choices..

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