Pandora vs. Last

So unfortunately Bit.Trip Void did not come out this monday, so I will be discussing Pandora radio vs. Last radio.

Both Pandora and Last are online radio stations that are free. They supply the user the ability to create their own radio stations by band, song, or even music type. The stations will play music similar to the music of the radio station. However they have some differences.

Pandora is the first one i stumbled across two years ago from my roommate. With Pandora you can create you own stations, and they will be in a list so you can switch at any time. Pandora gives you the oppritunity to skip songs, and to even favorite them, so it will play music similar to that song. You can also ban songs you do not like. If two songs by the same band are banned than the band will no longer play unless you have favorited one of their other songs.

One thing that bothers Pandora users is that there are only a certain number of times you can skip songs, 6 per hour, but you can switch the station and you would have six more skips for that station. Another thing that users of Pandora dislike is that it recently added advertisements. There wasnt even an email sent out to its users that the ads would be added. They just sorta happened, like theyve been there all along.

The worst part of Pandora is that it becomes very repetitive with the music it plays, after about and hour or two it will start to repeat music you have already listened to, or start to play a bunch of music that does that not fit into your station.

The best parts about Pandora is the ability to combine radio stations so you can get a wider variety in you station, and that it is extremely simple to use.

I just recently found out about Last from a friend who truly believes that Last is better. Last is very different though, it has some similarities in Pandora but it is very different. Last also allows you to favorite and ban music. A really cool feature is that if you hear a song you like you can start a station from that song. Last also has descriptions of the bands being played, another plus.

There are a few things I like about Last. Last gives you the ability to skip as many songs as you want, instead of six per hour.  Another thing i like about it is that you can find out what your friends are listening to and see if you like their music. A neat thing of Last, kinda unnecessary though, is the slide show it will show of the band the song is from. It will show any pics that have been submitted of that band.

There are a lot of things I don’t like though. The site is a lot harder to navigate in. If you want to start a new station, you have to type in what is wanted in the search box, and then you will be put onto the page of whatever you typed in. After that you can actually choose to start the radio station, unlike Pandora, which will automatically start the music after a quick verification whether or not Pandora has the correct band or song.

Another thing I dislike, is when I want to use one of the many features of Last it may stop the station I am listening to and start another one in a completely new window. The site also runs at a slower pace. If you skip a song sometimes an error happens and you will have to wait for the station to restart itself.

The best part of Last though is it plays a lot more music and it is not repetitive after a certain amount of time.

The worst part of Last is its loading, and I think that is because of the slide show, and all the posts that you can post about the song.

Give either of these sites a try at either Pandora.com or Last.fm. I personally like Pandora better, but that may be because I have been listening to it longer. I plan on using Last for a while to see if I can get used to it, but if not I will stick with Pandora. I just like how you can go to Pandora and without even having to stay on the tab Pandora is on it will start playing music from whatever station was on last.

Completely off topic, but AIM 7 is up for all you AIM users, they dont seem to email their users about their updates. It’s really nice and anyone who uses it should update it.

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~ by zranoll on October 19, 2009.