Kevins Tips

There are several ways to listen to music online.  Many radio stations have their own website and you can listen to their station over the Internet.  There is software that let’s you tap into hundreds of online radio stations, catagorized by Genre.

One of the most unique sites I’ve seen in this arena is Pandora.  This has been around for awhile now, and is a fun way to listen to music.  Basically what you do is create a FREE account.  Then enter a song you like.  It takes that song and finds similar songs that you might like as well.  The behind the scenes of how it does this is a bit complicated, but in general it works pretty well.

The result is a playlist of sorts.  If you don’t like one of the songs it returns, you just tell it and it won’t play that song again.  You can also rate a song, so it will play songs you like more frequently.

What does Pandora Mean?  The name Pandora means “all gifted” in Greek. In ancient Greek mythology, Pandora received many gifts from the Gods, including the gift of music, from Apollo. She was also, as we all know, insatiably curious.

Website: Pandora

I will have many future posts regarding music, most of which will be related to MP3s.  Since this website is geared towards the average consumer, let’s briefly talk about the MP3.

MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer III and it is a standard for audio compression that makes any music file smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. MP3 is part of MPEG, an acronym for Motion Pictures Expert Group, a family of standards for displaying video and audio using lossy compression.

What that means in brief, is that on a digital audio file (ie. a song)  the file size is HUGE.  This is in part because in order to maintain a high quality sound, you need a lot of information.  An MP3 is a format that says “Well that’s nice, but you don’t REALLY need that high a quality” so it takes things out in such a way that makes for a far smaller file size.  The good part is that you can fit several songs on your computer, or other device like an MP3 player.  The bad part is that you do lose some quality.  How much loss you notice depends upon how good of an ear you have.  Considering that most of the time we are listening to music with other outside noise, the quality is acceptable for most.

If you’d like to learn more about the MP3, checkout “The History of the MP3″