Train your Internet radio
Some Internet radios come with a particularly useful feature: you can train them by marking songs as good or bad. We put two new services to the test: Stereo8 and Jelli. How good are they?
Stereo8
Stereo8 (http://www.stereo8.com) is a Canadian Internet radio which allows users to have their own say. You could call it the “Web 2.0” version of a traditional music request programme. Note.Stereo8 is currently developing a desktop version, but for the moment you can listen to it only in Firefox (shortly in Internet Explorer too). You should firstly log in using your existing account at Facebook, Twitter, Google or OpenID. Login via Google failed in our test, but it worked via Facebook. Click on one of the five music genres (Hiphop/Rap, Pop/Hits, Dance/Electronic, Rock/Alternative and the bizarre Video Games), and you will see the Upcoming playlist. You can now manipulate this list by voting (several times, if you wish) for a particular song.
Choose you own music? You can also upload MP3s from your hard disk via the Share a Song button. Users can then in their turn vote for these songs. Note. This only works if these songs are also present in the Last.fm database (http://www.last.fm). We’ll not comment on the issue of author’s rights, but Stereo8 promises to have the uploaded MP3s removed from its servers after 48 hours automatically.
Our conclusion. Stereo8 is an excellent initiative, but for now the number of users and songs is much too limited to make it really useful. For instance, the Pop/Hits section was still empty when we visited.
Jelli
Jelli (http://www.jelli.net) also lets you control the music played by Internet radios. During our visit we saw four radio stations, but only Hot30 Countdown appeared to work. On the right of the screen you’ll see the playlist. It offers various voting options: “v” moves a song higher in the list, “x” moves it down, the “rocket” icon places it at the top of the list, the “bomb” moves it to the bottom - to access the latter options, you should click on the “radioactive” icon first. You can also rate the current song by using the “rocks” or “sucks” button. The playlist is constantly adjusted on the basis of the votes. When too many negative votes are cast, the song is simply pulled off the air.
Choose you own music? The search field at the top allows you to try to add a particular song to the playlist. This worked remarkably well during our tests.
Our conclusion. Jelli is based on a good idea. However, more radio stations for specific genres need to be added.
The familiars?
How about the existing “music recommendation services” which allow users to adjust their playlists, such as Last.fm (http://www.last.fm) and Pandora (http://www.pandora.com)? Because of author’s rights the latter station isn’t available in our country free of charge - but by using a tool such as Hotspot Shield (http://hotspotshield.com) we succeeded in circumventing this limitation. Still, these services have a different starting point. Stereo8 and Jelli offer public music channels which can be adjusted by several users. Conversely, at Last.fm and Pandora you create individual radio stations for personal use - you could for instance launch a U2 station, play songs, pause, relisten, etc. - but the selection of songs is based on the votes of all the users.
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