Launchcast = nice
If you've never used Yahoo's Launchcast radio service before you really ought to give it a try. You can create your own customized radio station by rating artists, albums and even individual songs. The more music you rate, the more it grows to know your tastes and will serve up music that's freakishly in-line with things you'll like. As I sit here typing this, it's playing a version of Hendrix's 'Hey Joe' by some guy named Popa Chubby. I would've never heard of this guy otherwise. Now I can give him a good rating and I'll likely hear some of his other stuff in the future.
My Launchcast station
The only downside to Launchcast is that you can't use it on Firefox (or an a Mac.) I can get around the Firefox issue by simply running Yahoo Messenger where it's nicely integrated. Still a no-go for you Mac users though. :( But according to the blog below, might that change in the near future?
VOIP Watch Blog - New Yahoo Messenger for Mac coming?
The Launchcast service is currently based on Microsoft's ActiveX so IF they ever make it compatible with Macs and/or Firefox they're going to have to switch to another platform. Not sure if they could acomplish the same thing via Flash or not. Sure would be nice if they could make it happen though.
You need to give Pandora a try. It uses a Flash interface that works on all the major browsers and operating systems...well, those that support Flash. :)
http://www.pandora.com
I remember reading something about that on a tech forum a couple weeks ago. Looks pretty cool although the interface is a lot different than what I'm used to. I wish it offered more of a graduated scale than just thumbs-up/thumbs-down.
I like the high quality stream though. The biggest problem I can see with that though is that it absolutely hammers my bandwidth when it loads/caches the song. Not an issue at home, but I imagine the bandwidth police here at the office would pull me over and beat me with a club if I used it here at work.
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