Pandora Caps Listener Hours for Free Version

The popular radio music site Pandora released a notice today indicating that they are switching their policies on free audio play to limit user accounts to 40 listener hours a month. Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora released the statement to listeners who have statistically listened to pandora for more than 40 hours per month. "We’ve reached a resolution to the calamitous Internet radio royalty ruling of 2007. After more than two precarious years, we are finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates – thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our listeners who voiced an absolute avalanche of support for us on Capitol Hill. We are deeply thankful."

Pandora is a flash-based website offering customized audio playback stations based on a target song or genre of your choice. It uses Music Genome Project technology to find songs that best match your search criteria.

"Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising alone... the combination of our usage patterns and the "per song per listener" royalty cost creates a financial reality that we can't ignore."

Pandora is offering two pay-options to alleviate the audio dilemma:

1. Listen free until you reach 40 hours, then pay a one-time $0.99 fee to continue playing music for the rest of the month.
2. Upgrade to Pandora One, the premium version of Pandora. This gives unlimited listening, a desktop application, personalized skins, 192kbps streams, and more for $36/year, or $3/month.

Pandora will be adding a listener hour counter to their site to allow you to see your current usage. They recommend the use of the pause button when you're not listening to save listener hours.

It is unclear how this change will affect listenership or advertisement revenues for the popular music site, but speculations are that Pandora may loose steam from the change as competing services take listener counts away.

Audio Management: Formats

MP3? OGG? M4P? What do these all mean?

They're all audio formats. An audio format is the way a piece of digitized music is stored on your computer. They're all different, but accomplish a similar goal. It's sort of like how you'd save your essay for a class in a Text File, Word file, or a Word 2007 file: they're just different.

Selecting a Format

Selecting an audio format to choose for your music library is a tough choice because so many exist. It's important to choose one that will work for what you need. For most people, that format is MP3. Audiophiles swear by OGG (vorbis) or FLAC lossless, however those audio formats aren't as compatible as the mainstream ones. The big difference between formats is hard drive space and quality of sound. If you need to store massive amounts of music, consider storing it as OGG files or something with a very high compression ratio. If you want the most playability, select MP3.

One note about MP3: It's a great format, but it's licensed. This means that people using Open Source/free programs may not be able to read it. If you're into distributing audio as an artist, consider distributing both MP3 and OGG versions of your music to appeal to both commercial and noncommercial products and systems.

Encoding

Different audio types are not directly compatible with eachother. One of the hardest things is changing types of audio from one to another. You may have a program on your computer that only plays MP3's, for example, but all of your music is in MP4 or M4A. You can't just rename the file, you have to re-encode it!

There's a lot of programs out there for reencoding music, but a well featured one is MediaCoder (Sourceforge). Here's a quick crash course on how to use it:

At the top, select Add, and then the option most closely matching how you want to locate your music files. Add file is used for one or two files, but Add folder can be used to import entire folders, and even the folder's subfolders! If you are reencoding an iTunes media directory, select Add folders recursively.

The next step is to select the General tab in the middle of the screen. You may choose to place the output files wherever you'd like. For ease of use, I'd suggest a different folder. Select the audio tab and set the encoder to whatever filetype you'd like to convert to. On the right side, select the tab for the encoder type you previously selected, and configure options as necessary. Some experience on audio types is required to select the right options, but for typical MP3's you can pick Custom / CBR / 128 / Channel: Stereo.

At the top of the program click Actions, then Transcode! It takes a few minutes to transcode each music file, so the process may take a few days to finish.

Review

That's most of the basics you need for managing audio types on your computer. For more information, check out the Wikipedia page on the topic!

Stay tuned tomorrow for another article about audio management!

Audio Management

This week here on The Silver Onion, we're going to take a look at audio solutions for managing your cluttered music libraries! We're going to cover directory management, audio formats, ID3 tagging, ripping, audio programs, and sharing this week!

So keep your RSS browsers tweaked to The Silver Onion this week for some neat tips on how to make your audio library work for you!

Microsoft made a Zune Theme?

Yeah, this surprised me too.

Apparently Microsoft still likes Windows XP, or is really trying to push the Zune into popularity, because a while ago they created a theme for Windows XP that changes your desktop to an orange and black theme. It's definitely a lot better looking than the traditional Windows XP desktop decorations.

You can get a copy right here at this awesome link.

School House Rock - Fireworks

We thought here at The Silver Onion that you might enjoy some School House Rock about our lovely Fourth of July. Enjoy!

Happy Independence Day!

Ah, the smell of the fireworks and the questionable legality of having them in all twenty-eight states that seem to dislike the fun ones!

Anyway, Happy Declaration of Independence Being Revised Day! (The real independence day is actually July 2, 1776. It wasn't until the fourth that the document was revised and accepted!)

And some fireworks for you:

(Credit goes to a Google Images Search. I wish I was awesome enough to have taken this.)

And just in case you haven't had enough, here's some pretty awesome patriotic wallpapers to celebrate just how kick-ass we are as a country. And how!

Google Chrome is Shiny!

Google Chrome is the new (well, comparatively..) web browser by Google. Being a die hard Firefox fan, I decided to give it a try to see if it is all it's cracked up to be.

Google Chrome is a browser built around the Webkit system that Apple's Safari browser uses. It's fast. Very fast. NYTimes.com loaded in just under 8 seconds in a default session of Firefox, but took only 5.23 seconds on Chrome. These few precious seconds may not seem like much, but imagine the time saved total over a period of weeks?

Google Chrome achieves much of its glory by assigning web pages to their own processes. You can see the processes in the Windows Task Manager, or for more detail right click Chrome's application taskbar to select Task Manager, where Chrome conveniently shows both process status and each tab's network usage.

Another feature with pushing each webpage to its own process means that if a website stops responding, it only crashes that tab and not the entire process. Google Chrome even lets you refresh the tab to restore your browsing in that tab!

Google Chrome also includes download manager abilities. Downloading a file is a pretty process, with a nice download arrow appearing and a bottom toolbar shown. Unfortunately, you cannot do many actions to files in the download bar that appears apart from opening them. There is a link to load all downloads in a pane to clear them, but it's not a straightforward process.

Google Chrome also prevents you from adding spyware to your daily browsing habits. If a page has a recognized spyware object on it, Chrome notifies you and gives you an opportunity to stop loading the page, or continue understanding the risks.

One big turnback is that Google Chrome does not feature plugin support. Users of Firefox would be hard-pressed to regain functionality that its users relied on in the past.

All in all Google Chrome is a fast and easy to use entry level browser. It doesn't feature all of the fancy customization as Firefox, but is an easy to use browser for anyone looking to move away from the old Internet Explorer.