Radio One Llama
One Llama has just launched a
beta of their online radio search portal. It is a pretty simple service
- type in the name of an artist you like and One Llama will point you
to online radio stations that have recently played music by that artist.
Here's an example - I searched for Emerson, Lake and Palmer and I was
given a list of 10 stations that have played ELP lately. I can click
on any of these stations and listen to the station immediately
(although, It may be a long time before the station plays ELP again).
One may ask why anyone would prefer using this type of search engine to find an internet station that plays music that you'd like - when one can just go to Last.fm or Pandora and create a radio station that is customized to your exact taste. I think that there is still some advantage to human-curated online radio - especially from stations like Radio Paradise where a real DJ is creating playlists. If you want to find a station with a real DJ that plays the kind of music that you'd like, One LLama Radio may be the place for you.
I must admit I am a bit disappointed with the current One Llama radio. I was expecting something similar to the work that Martin Gasser, Arthur Flexer and Gerhard Widmer have done using explorative visualizations based on content-analysis to help people find online radio. There's an ISMIR paper here: Streamcatcher: Integrated Visualization of Music Clips and Online Audio Streams. Perhaps the next incarnation of One Llama radio will be a bit more advanced.
I have 3 invites to One Llama Radio - if you'd like one just leave a comment and I'll send you one. (Via TechCrunch)
I, of course, am interested.
Zac
Posted by Zac Johnson on September 27, 2008 at 10:39 PM EDT #
Hey Paul, great to see that you've had a chance to try the Llama out and post some good, objective feedback. We have had some interesting conversations in the past about all the various things we'd love to do with the visualizations; I think the possibilities are endless here and we all think it's important to make Internet radio an enjoyable experience for the end-user. I'll relay this info along to the rest of the team. Thanks again for providing your feedback.
Posted by Jared on September 28, 2008 at 03:21 AM EDT #