Working Hard, or Hardly Working?

I work, as many of you already know, at the Missoula Public Library. My days are spent either at a public desk or tucked away in the bowels of the building working on computer related stuff. You know...websites, setting up machines, etc. Another thing about me you need to know is that I need music around me at all times. I'm not too fond of lugging CDs back and forth from work, and not too keen on using any space on my work PC to download or rip CDs, so my alternative? Online internet radio. I've found a few gems that I thought I would pass on.

www.pandora.com

Pandora is my staple for longer periods of work, when I just want something to play and not have to mess with anything. All you have to do is go to the site, and enter the name of an artist or song you like and it will feed you more songs that are related to the ones you picked. Then you have the option of giving songs a thumbs up or thumbs down so each station is "tuned" to your personal preferences. I like Pandora because you can have many, many stations and the stream is almost never interrupted. There are advertisements, but they are very limited and don't affect or interupt the listening experience at all. The major downfall of Pandora, is you're limited to more mainstream artists, and usually older material. Which leads me to...

www.hypem.com

The Hype Machine is my new standby, as it feeds from blogs and gives you the newest music, with some good older stuff as well. One definate advantage is the hype machines ability to open in multiple formats (winamp, real player, windows media, itunes, or flash) so you can skip around, listen to tracks again, or back up a few seconds and you have none of these options in pandora. The Hype Machine also gives you the option to link directly to the blog the music was pulled from. Great! This has become my favorite I think.

Other notable stations include:

www.barsuk.com - Their online radio station is great, but doesn't change all that often. But who needs to change when you have music as good as they do.

www.kpunk.com - K Records has an online mix tape that changes more often than barsuk, but still not very often. You gotta love K Records.

www.last.fm - I haven't had much luck with last, although I hear its very similar to Pandora. The times I've tried, my stream has gotten cut off and I've gotten frustrated.