[gui-talk] Sirius

[hawkeye]

-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Steve Pattison
Forget about Sirius and get Pandora.Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 3:47 AM
To: Access L; CUG Members; VIP-L
Subject: [gui-talk] Fwd: First impressions of hope.

All prices in this message are in US dollars.  -Steve.

From:    Christopher Bartlett themusicalbrewer at gmail.com
To:      PC Audio Discussion List pc-audio at pc-audio.org

For those unaware, Hope is Christopher Toth's (of Qwitter fame) front end
for http://www.pandora.com, which is a web site for music playing and
discovery that allows you to create stations by selecting seeds and then
rating how well songs it presents to you fit the sound you're going for, or
how much you like them.  Until this week, it has been functionally
inaccessible, though with a lot of fiddling, one could make it work to some
extent.  Enter HOPE, Toth's Pandora player, a $10 download from
http://www.q-continuum.net.

There is an html read-me that explains the program, but frankly it's
unnecessary, since the interface is dead simple, consisting of tabbable
controls, all of which have keyboard shortcuts that speak as you tab to the
control, allowing you to memorize them in a jiffy.

When you first enter the program, you are asked to log in, or if you don't
have a Pandora account, to register.  Both of these operations were
inaccessible with any screen reader from the web site or Pandora's own
desktop client.  If you have an account, simply enter your email address and
password.  I haven't tried the registration as I already had an account,
though I Imagine it to be quite easy.

Now you go to your station list, empty if you're first using Pandora.  From
here, you can play any existing station, rename or delete it, or search to
create a new station.  Searching is as simple as typing in an artist name or
song name into the search box and tabbing to the search button.  Results
appear in a list one tab away from the search button.  Find the one you want
to use and tab to the create station button.  Your station now appears in
your station list.

Once you've selected a station and hit the listen to station button, you're
in the player.  Here you have fields with the current song's artist, title
and album, a play, pause, previous, next and stop buttons, and volume and
song position sliders.  Again all have keyboard shortcuts and are easy to
operate.  Even the information fields have shortcut keys to quickly move to
and read the information.

There are two other important controls, the thumbs up and thumbs down
controls.  If you're unfamiliar with Pandora, these are the controls you use
to customize your stations.  If you want the song you're hearing to be
played more often, (and songs that Pandora thinks are like it) hit the
thumbs up button.  If you don't want the song appearing on your station, (or
again, songs like it according to Pandora) hit the thumbs down button.
Pandora immediately stops playing the song you've rejected and moves to the
next song.  You can also skip the song without rating it up or down by using
the next button.

Observations.  HOPE is fast and responsive, much more so than is the web
site.  I got playback within two seconds of selecting my station, and using
the thumbs down or next button stopped the song immediately and moved to the
next song in the stream nearly instantly, again beating the hell out of the
web site's performance.

There is an important facet of station editing missing.  On the web site, it
is possible to go to the page for a particular station and edit its
information, including adding a station description for other people to see,
and selecting artist and song seeds to add to the thumbs-up list manually.
This last makes it possible to hand-customize a station to a degree that the
regular method doesn't.  Because this functionality does exist on the web
site, and in a reasonably accessible fashion, this isn't a deal killer at
all, but would be nice if Mr. Toth could add.

Another nit is that search results for songs don't return the artist.  If
one searched for "Helter Skelter" one wouldn't be able to tell the
difference between the Beatles ve3rsion and the Pat Benetar version, which
might make for an incorrect station.  I'd like to see this information
provided.

HOPE is a great implementation of a Pandora desktop client with a lot of the
flair and intuitive ease of use of the Qwitter client.  At $10, this is
definitely software worth supporting.  Rating 4.5 stars.

                Christopher Bartlett

Regards Steve
Email:  srp at internode.on.net
MSN Messenger:  internetuser383 at hotmail.com
Skype:  steve1963
Twitter:  steve9782

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