Good advice.  Between Pandora and a Blue Ray drive that is upgradable as the standard solidifies the PS3 isn't such a bad deal.  I think the xbox 360 offers a pandora app as well but I probably wouldn't use.  I don't keep the xbox where I want the audio and I don't want to use the xbox itself to manage pandora.  I really dig the slim remote offered with the Duet from slimdevices.  The management box itself is tiny with no screen and a few diferent output types and everything else is managed either via a browser or the video screen on the remote.

Still might do the PS3 one day though for the drive alone – probably the only reason since wormwood rants about the poor selection of decent titles available for it.

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I have to admit that I am lucky to be able to use it at work and home.  At work I tend to listen to something to drown out the noise of the office – typically my “disturbed” channel which is trained for mostly metal and hard rock.  At home, particularly when I am just surfing around I put up the “Tiesto” channel wihch is a good mix of trance and house techno.

I have even considered getting one of the several devices that will let me stream it through the house receiver so that I can use Pandora as the default vs. broadcast radio or cd (which are all mp3s anyways).

Slim Devices has several but this is the one I am looking at without spending a grand.

http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_duet.html

I have been on a quest of sorts over the past year to explore deeper into various genres of music that I listen too. Having been in a rut of listening to the same bands over and over it has been fantastic to branch out and listen to the deeper tracks of the bands I love and sample music that my ears like to hear. I don’t foresee this quest ending any time soon but I am grateful for some of the tools people have shown me along the way.

Prior to using any tool to help me search intelligently for new bands, tracks or types of music, I merely categorized it myself and tried, sometimes in vain, to describe what I was looking for to others. My main love is that of Symphonic Metal, at least that is what I have learned it is called. To me this is fast, rhythmic, trance inducing, guitar laden, heavy metal overlayed with rich melodic vocals. The focus is on the rhythm, depth, and the power of the instruments highlighted by vocals that add richness and character to the music. This is music that you can feel as well as hear.

My exposure to Symphonic Metal was pretty limited even when I tried to look around. In the beginning of my search I really could not narrow down what it was I was looking for. I could not quantify what specific parts of the music I liked in a terms that made search engines happy enough to produce usable results. * Any search for a metal band would land thousands upon thousands of hits.* Frustration was setting in quickly.* Prior to heading back to the album collection came a gift from Olaf. Pandora! And I don’t mean that allusive box.

Pandora is a fantastically simple web-based radio where each channel, that you create, plays music based on what you like.* You tell Pandora what you like by entering the name of a band or song.* It uses the Music Genome Project to find a Vector of the music you entered.* These Vectors are then presented to you as a stream of songs from a wide variety of bands that share the same Genes that make up the Vector.* You can further tailor any results by telling Pandora you like or dislike a particular song it has presented to you.* It uses this feedback, much like a Naive Bayes Classifier, to refine the list of Genes that appeal to the particular channel you created.

Pandora.com schooled me in what I really like about the music I listen to: use of string ensemble, paired vocal harmony, a vocal-centric aesthetic and minor key tonality, hard rock roots, a subtle use of vocal harmony, extensive vamping, mild rhythmic syncopation, demanding instrumental part writing and mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation.

I have discovered many bands that I would likely never have heard of just entering a song or band I liked to hear and pruning the results I was presented.* Here are but a few of my favorites:

• Nightwish
• Ark
• Xandria
• Beautiful Sin
• Kamelot
• Elis
• Aesma Daeva
• Waltari
• Rhapsody Of Fire
• Leaves’ Eyes

My quest to learn about new music out there has only really started but I look forward to using not only Pandora Radio but also any new generation of tools that come along to help.