Dozens of online music streaming options have cropped up over the past few years, and many of them offer well-conceived interfaces. Pandora and Last.fm are two of my favorite players, and I will be reviewing them on this post. Please note: I hold no stake in either of these startups, although I would not mind if I am offered a stake…

Although I am relatively technically oriented, Pandora and Last.fm appeal to me through their intuitive interfaces. When I am in the hospital scrolling labs or churning out discharge summaries in the middle of the night, I do not wish to be burdened with menu options. I only want to fire up my portable firefox browser, start up some music, and get back to work.

Pandora.com requires you to create an account. It will save your channel preferences, and automatically load the next time you visit the site. The interface is clean; there is a volume and a “forward” control. The active song is displayed with album art a-la Coverflow.  The right column always displays a banner advertisement that can be [conveniently] removed with Adblock. If you want artist or album information, you can simply click on the links provided. The genre classification system works well to incorporate music of similar taste to that of your original search. Overall, it’s a great free online radio.

Last.fm offers identical content, although the interface is more distracting.  A description of the band and song is provided on every track, along with a colorful background consistent with last.fm’s color scheme. You do not have to create an account to use the website, which allows for easier access. I think that last.fm’s genre algorithm may be slightly more accurate than Pandora’s, although I may simply have a preference for Last.fm’s licensed artists. I typically use Last.fm at work mainly because I don’t have to log into their website.

A third web player that I frequent is Seeqpod. Unlikely Last.fm or Pandora, Seeqpod doesn’t offer a continuous player that tracks similar types of music you like. Instead, it finds the exact song that you search for, and queues it into the player. Furthermore, it links directly to a website that contains the media file so that you can download it! This is the only music search engine/player that I’ve encountered with download capabilities. However, the service appears to be under renovation at this point. Hopefully it will return in due time.

computing tech