What I enjoy about Pandora is their powerful per-song metadata/tags/acoustic fingerprinting. For instance, if I want to find a song similar to the Sabrosa by the Beasty Boys, Pandora is going to get pretty close. They even display the various tags for the song.
Naturally, if Pandora’s APIs are closed to Roon, then possibly another solution such as MusicDNS might be a possible alternative source for obtaining acoustic fingerprinting information. Even with the existing implementation of Roon’s radio functionality, it’d be nice to know why a given song gets selected beyond: “Playing music similar to [SongTitle] by [SongArtist]”.
It is my understanding that one of the obstacles to Pandora integration is that Pandora only licenses to its early (2008) partners and to manufacturers of hardware. Now that Roon is set to sell its own hardware, is the Pandora integration a better possibility/probability?
Being able to apply Pandora’s Music Genome Project data to my own collection might be as life-altering as Roon itself was. I haven’t used Pandora in a while, though. Is it still as good at predicting what music you want to hear? I remember comparing it to the iTunes Genius algorithm, and there was no comparison. I learned of new artists from Pandora. iTunes would only pick out a couple of very popular artists that were in the same genre/sub-genre and constantly play only those artist’s popular tracks. It has been a while, though, since I used either service.
