Sophinisba Solis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophinisba) wrote2008-10-10 03:55 pm
sophinisba) wrote2008-10-10 03:55 pm
iPod and Pandora
I've now had my new iPod Nano for a week and I totally love it! It is so delightfully small but it holds all the songs I have in my iTunes so far. (There are still a lot of CDs I haven’t saved yet but whatever.) It is blue and really very pretty. I’ve never had an iPod before and I’m just so pleased.
I've taken it to the gym for walking and (a wee bit of) running on a treadmill a couple times and found that works pretty well but not perfectly. I have this armband that is designed to carry a classic iPod so it was a little big for the Nano but mostly okay. More of a problem is that it's always slipping down on my arm, sometimes even wanting to slip past the elbow, which makes me want to bend my elbows more, which is not great when you're trying to relax your arms and save your energy for the running and all. Plus it’s in a bit of an inconvenient place as far as adjusting the volume and skipping songs. I don't think it would work to just hold it in one hand because I'm always having to press buttons on the treadmill and I'm scared I'll get confuzzled and fall off (as I once did years ago while holding a Discman – not fun!). Anybody have advice or ideas for this?
Speaking of music and technology, I've also been having some fun with the website Pandora.com. The way it works, you tell it the name of a song or an artist that you like, and it makes a "radio station" with similar music. You can add more songs or artists as "seeds" to influence what kind of station it is, and for every song that they play you say whether you like it or not, so it keeps refining as you go, and meanwhile you're usually listening to a lot of music that you like, some of it familiar and some new. If you like a song you haven't heard before you can get more information about the artist really quickly and there are always links for you to buy the song from Amazon or iTunes.
I’ve found that it works especially well for finding artists that match other artists, not quite as well for the feel of a particular song. The variety is not as big as it would be with an actual radio station but sometimes that's okay. The most pleasant surprise for me has been how quickly it figured out my tastes for my Latin American rock station, and after that I was disappointed with how little African and Arabic music they seemed to have.
The other thing I've been doing for music lately is borrowing CDs from the public library and copying them to my iTunes. I know this is not especially ethical but it's just so easy I don't really want to stop.
I've taken it to the gym for walking and (a wee bit of) running on a treadmill a couple times and found that works pretty well but not perfectly. I have this armband that is designed to carry a classic iPod so it was a little big for the Nano but mostly okay. More of a problem is that it's always slipping down on my arm, sometimes even wanting to slip past the elbow, which makes me want to bend my elbows more, which is not great when you're trying to relax your arms and save your energy for the running and all. Plus it’s in a bit of an inconvenient place as far as adjusting the volume and skipping songs. I don't think it would work to just hold it in one hand because I'm always having to press buttons on the treadmill and I'm scared I'll get confuzzled and fall off (as I once did years ago while holding a Discman – not fun!). Anybody have advice or ideas for this?
Speaking of music and technology, I've also been having some fun with the website Pandora.com. The way it works, you tell it the name of a song or an artist that you like, and it makes a "radio station" with similar music. You can add more songs or artists as "seeds" to influence what kind of station it is, and for every song that they play you say whether you like it or not, so it keeps refining as you go, and meanwhile you're usually listening to a lot of music that you like, some of it familiar and some new. If you like a song you haven't heard before you can get more information about the artist really quickly and there are always links for you to buy the song from Amazon or iTunes.
I’ve found that it works especially well for finding artists that match other artists, not quite as well for the feel of a particular song. The variety is not as big as it would be with an actual radio station but sometimes that's okay. The most pleasant surprise for me has been how quickly it figured out my tastes for my Latin American rock station, and after that I was disappointed with how little African and Arabic music they seemed to have.
The other thing I've been doing for music lately is borrowing CDs from the public library and copying them to my iTunes. I know this is not especially ethical but it's just so easy I don't really want to stop.