I finally pulled the trigger the other day and ordered a Squeezebox. I’ve had my eye on them for a long time, but for some reason I just never ordered one. Within 5 minutes of receiving it I had it configured and integrated into my network. By far the coolest feature of the Squeezebox though is the ability to stream music from Pandora. If you’ve never heard of Pandora you’re missing out on one of the gems of the Internet. The premise of Pandora is simple but elaborate. You give them a song or an artist you like. Every song in the Pandora “catalog” has been carefully scrutinized by musicians and they’ve created a genome for music. So they take the song you say you like and analyze what characteristics that song has. Then it pulls other music out of the catalog that shares those characteristics. For example my favorite station is one I created based on Atmoshpere (a local Minneapolis hip-hop group). I just clicked play on the station, and it played a song by Jurassic 5. If I click “Why did you play this song”, Pandora says:

Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features a slow moving bass line, a dry recording sound, thin orchestration and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.

Suffice to say Pandora is badass. The point of this post was the Squeezeox though. This little device is very well done. It is intuitive, easy to use, great looking and sounds fantastic. Especially at the price, $300, I’d say you’re remiss if you’re still playing Mp3s in your house by hooking a laptop up to the stereo. I’m going to order another one for my bedroom.

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