Listen Up!

It's "Techie Tuesday"!!! Whew, today I can let my geek self out for some air.

I want to tell you about two online radio services that I've discovered. These are both free and seem to be run on visual advertising.

The first one is AccuRadio. I JUST found this one the other day and liked the fact that you have choices of the type of station to which you can listen. Types of stations included are holiday, jazz, decades (includes the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s), county, showtunes, and many more. You can de-select artists that you do not want to hear and skip past songs you don't like. I find all of that very appealing. However, there is a very short ad/station identification message every three songs or so. The other problem I found was that you could only de-select ten artists. Again, I just found this station so I do not know much about it.

The other service is Pandora Radio. I have been using this service for several months now and really like it. You are able to create your own station by entering an artist or a song you want to hear. The station will either play that song or artist or one that is similar, and then others like it. You have several options: give the songs chosen a thumbs up (to hear more like it) or down (to indicate that you do not like it), add more songs to the station, and create other stations. The service walks you through it pretty simply. If you turn down too many songs, it will deny your ability to skip forward after a while. I really like this service overall, and it's really easy to use.