Out with the old, in with the new. FM Radio has been around forever. The same old repetitive songs, half of which you hate, are the embodiment of someone else’s music tastes that you’ve struggled to adapt to.

Seriously, that gets old after a while. iPods are great. You buy (or download) music off the internet and store them indefinitely on your handheld noise-producing device and listen for hours on end. It’s great to have music that suits your choices, but no matter how many songs you collect, it never feels enough.

Now, there’s a music service called Pandora. Pandora has been around for many years now, but not many people know about it/use it. Pandora is essentially, one big music collection. They have thousands of music titles for you to listen to. But best of all, it’s completely legal.

Pandora understands your radio and iPod woes and is determined to do something about it. Pandora doesn’t just separate songs by genre, but they also assign "attributes" (almost 400) to songs depending on the individual song’s qualities.

All of Pandora’s songs are available to you through their radio station. Oh wait, radio? Not that again... Well Pandora provides radio that’s different than the kind you get over the airwaves.

Pandora lets you create your own radio stations based on your own personal music choices. You can set different "seed" songs that tell Pandora what kind of music should play on that particular station.

But Pandora usually doesn’t get it right on the first try. As your customized radio station plays out songs for you, you can either give the song a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Through this careful refinement, Pandora adapts to the kind of music you like.

Getting started is unbelievably easy. All you need is a Web Browser with Adobe Flash. (If you can watch YouTube videos, you’re all set.)

Visit Pandora.com and you should get a page like this:

Just type in a song. Any song that you’ve been humming in your head whilst you were reading this. Press Listen Now and you’ll get this screen:

In a few seconds, your brand-new music station will be setup and you can start listening. You can create more stations (up to 100) if you want a wider variety of music. Click on the "thumbs-up" icon if you like the song that’s playing and the "thumbs-down" icon if you don’t.

If you start hearing more and more "thumbs-up" quality songs, then Pandora’s ESP music-taste-detection is working.

Yeah. But Pandora places a lot of restrictions on your music-listening to keep their service free. First off, you can’t rewind through a song. You can skip to the next song, but keep pressing the next button and you’ll get a nasty little message.

Pandora also limits the number of hours per day/month that you can listen to their radio. But that’s okay. Just come to RogerHub and listen to some Mooosic! Finally, Pandora doesn’t let you explicitly choose which songs to play.

Final tip:
If you’ve been listening to Pandora non-stop and your hours have all been used up, you can continue listening with these simple steps:

1. On your computer, go to "%APPDATA%/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects"

2. There will be a single randomly named folder. Open it up.

3. A list of a bunch of website names should come up. Look for the one that’s titled "Pandora.com"

4. Delete the two files in there, and BAM. You’re done. You’ll have to login again afterwards.

Yeahh. So, have fun listening to Pandora Radio!

(I took this while I was walking home today. It doesn’t look as good on the computer as it does on my phone. )

-Roger