Pandora

It is very rare that you will ever see us rate an application a 5 out of 5, but folks, this is one of those special times. Pandora Radio is one of the best free applications released in the App Store from day one of its launch. If you haven’t heard of Pandora, I don’t know where you have been for the past year! Pandora.com has become one of the internet’s most popular websites for free music playback and the reason it is so popular is because of the “Music Genome Project”. Pandora will analyze any song, artist, or composer you feed it, and it will throw back at you an unending list of songs very similar to yours. If you like the song, you can hit the thumbs up button and Pandora will keep playing more songs of that style. If you don’t like the song, you can hit thumbs down instead, and Pandora will no longer play songs of that style.

All of this, and more, have been ported onto the iPhone and iPod Touch through the Pandora application. It is completely free, just like its sister website, and it still packs the punch of being one of the best free music websites. On the application you can add a new station (aka a song, artist, or composer you like), and Pandora will quickly load for you a whole set of songs that match the style of your song. Then, in what looks fairly similar to the iPod’s Now Playing window, the Pandora app offers you several features. There are the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons, play, skip song, volume, and finally two more buttons. First, on the top right you have a button linking to the “Why this song is playing” page. If my station was Thriller by Michael Jackson, and Pandora played “When Doves Cry”, by Prince, I could go to this page to see why Pandora thinks these songs are so similar. Here is what Pandora said:

“We’re playing this track because it features repetitive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping, a clear focus on recording studio production, minor key tonality, subtle use of fender rhodes and many other similarities identified in the Music Genome Project.”

The other button on the Now Playing page is an arrow, which upon clicking will offer you three new tools: Bookmark this song, Bookmark this artist, and Buy from iTunes. If you bookmark the song, you won’t see anything happen on your iPhone, but if you go to Pandora’s website and you click Your Profile, you’ll find your bookmarked song or artist. Buy from iTunes will just take you to the iPhone’s or iPod Touch’s iTunes application so you can buy or preview the song.

One that thing we should point out is Pandora is a free music service, and in today’s time, where music labels are going law-suit crazy, new copyright laws restrict Pandora from letting you shuffle through too many songs. What this translates to is limiting you to only 6 song skips per hour on each station. See the gallery for more on what we mean.

The greatest part of this application, the simple fact that has earned it a 5 out of 5 from AppStoreFans, is that the song quality is oustanding. Pandora will grab onto your 3G or Wifi connection and it will load up your song fast. You won’t hear any interruptions or any hiccups. The song will play just like it is on your iPhone or iPod, you will almost forget that everything is coming from the internet.

The only thing more we could have asked for is the ability to exit the Pandora’s app, go into our contacts, text message someone, play a game, while still having Pandora’s radio playing. But hey, the only people you can blame for not letting this happen are the one’s that made your iPhone. According to Apple’s SDK rules, all applications must close completely when you exit to the main menu. So, with real disappointments with this app, it rightfully deserves its 5 out of 5.