As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (here, here and here), I am a big fan of Sonos. When they added standalone (no PC required) Rhapsody support a while back, I was pretty excited and Sonos converted me into a paying subscriber to Rhapsody.
Now they’ve added another great service with the release of version 2.2 of Sonos’ system software: Pandora. I’ve been a big fan of Pandora ever since it first launched and I think it is the one of the most interesting of the music-discovery services out there. By employing an army of musicologists who have tagged and categorized hundreds of thousands of songs with hundreds of attributes, they’ve created what I think it the most musical of the recommendation engines.
The fine folks at Sonos gave me early access to version 2.2 and I updated my system with the new software yesterday. I spent time this morning listening to three different artist-centric stations that I created on the fly: Alison Krauss, Steely Dan and St. Germain. I spent half an hour listening to each station and was consistently surprised and pleased by the quality of the songs that came up and I discovered some new music that I will definitely add to my collection.
Thanks for the early look, Sonos, and thanks for adding another great service to the platform!
Update: Pandora, I have a suggestion for you. It isn’t immediately obvious to me how I would create a URL to link to a particular Pandora station. I would have linked back to Pandora in this blog post for each of the example stations I gave, but instead had to link to the artists’ web sites since how one would do that isn’t apparent.