Who doesn’t like free music? If you’re part of the Napster generation, then you know how addictive free music can.
Apple gives us a few streaming internet radio stations in iTunes. But it’s Pandora that really makes streaming music fun and free.
You subscribe to a station in Pandora, tell it what music you like and don’t like, and Pandora finds music to match.
What’s better than Pandora? PandoraJam. This neat little Mac app streams Pandora music to your Mac, but also streams music to an AppleTV or Airport Express (to your speaker system).
And, PandoraJam records Pandora music into iTunes so you can grow your music collection and carry it with you in iPod or iPhone. What’s not to like?
PandoraJam can be controlled by your Mac’s Apple remote. Stream Pandora music to your speaker system (you’ll need Airport Express). And, record Pandora music streams into iTunes for iPod and iPhone.
The user interface is mostly self explanatory. The typical Pandora play and pause, like and dislike buttons are on top. Pandora stations are listed in the left Sidebar.
All it takes is a click to begin recording music in PandoraJam.
There’s also built-in Growl notifications, keyboard shortcuts so you don’t have to mouse around, even status updates for iChat, Skype, and Adium.
Tracks you like can be scribbled to Last.fm
Being that this is a Pandora app there are limits to the quality of the music you can stream, download, and record into iTunes, but it can do wonders for your music collection.
“Being that this is a Pandora app there are limits to the quality of the music you can stream, download, and record into iTunes…”
What are those limits?
Pandora’s streaming audio quality is pretty lame. It’s 64k for free streams, and 192k for Pandora One subscribers. Says who? Pandora.
When it originally came out PandoraJam’s primary feature was the ability to save songs to iTunes as you were listening to them, and even let you leave a station on overnight so you’d wake up to a folder of PandoraJam songs in iTunes. But Pandora changed their streaming format, and the low-bitrate stream for non-subscribers sucks anyway.