Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Over to Jango

So Last.fm decided to go back to their original plan to eliminate free radio everywhere but the US, UK & Germany. They announced this and implemented it today. I'm sure they were getting a lot of pressure from CBS management. As I said before, Rogers claims they plan to make some changes in a couple of months. So no LAUNCHCAST there. However, LAUNCHCAST still exists on the US Yahoo page so that's what I will use for now unless something better comes along. It's based on presets very similar to AOL Radio. In fact, they are exactly the same. Years ago I used Spinner which became AOL Radio. The players are similar and both have ads. But I can still rate songs and I can check the history so I know what album it is from. I have already set my presets and I can switch them around. Other services either aren't available in Canada (Pandora, Slacker, Spotify) or don't have a diverse enough music selection. There are quite a few like that. Jango is probably the best and I don't care for the interface. They want to be a social network so they want you to use the player on their webpage and I prefer a desktop web player. It's very clunky. They need to revamp it. Last.fm was OK. I thought it wasn't as intuitive as I would have liked. Not giving any notice to users is very poor form. They shouldn't have bothered to delay things if they were going to implement the restrictions anyway. What they did doesn't make much sense.

EDIT:It seems that the presets in LAUNCHCAST can't be saved so there's not much point to them. So I'm going to Jango and I may look closer at Radionomy later.

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