Customisable radio

@RANDOM

First, apologies if you don't have broadband or a really high-speed connection, because most of the stuff in this column won't work on the Tortoise Net. Second, if you love music, get yourself a high-speed connection right away, and put that iPod away for a bit.

The problem with radio is that you have no control over what the station chooses to play. In India, with our limited FM stations, streaming radio helped to a certain extent because it allowed listeners to pick the genre of music they wanted to hear.

But the bigger online radio got ""Virgin and Yahoo!'s radio stations, for instance "" the more mainstream radio became. It offered listeners only the big chart-toppers, very little of the new and indie stuff. And it was limiting: if you enjoyed Chutney, jazz, hiphop, country, Lata and Frank Sinatra, for instance, there was no chance you'd find all of this in any one station.

Last.fm (www.last.fm) and Pandora (www.pandora.com) are two examples of what new radio could be. Both offer custom-built streaming radio.

If you don't like a song that's playing, ban it (Last.fm offers that option) or forward to the next number (both Last.fm and Pandora offer this, though Pandora limits the number of songs you can speed past in a given hour of playtime).

Last.fm is built around the social network model; like MySpace, it's trying to be a place where people can hang out, exchange notes, or post other stuff. It requires some setup and downloads a "listening" programme called Audioscrobbler onto your hard drive so that it can match your musical tastes better "" some may have privacy issues with this, though most won't care.

You can either tune into existing streams "" jazz, hard rock, classical, even "emotionally disturbed" radio or "breakup with the boyfriend" radio""or build your own by feeding it a list of artistes you like. Once it's up and running, it's pretty good at locating similar artistes: if you list The Who, for instance, it'll also offer Pink Floyd; if you pick The Band, it'll offer Dylan.

It does try to sneak in the odd promotional track, but it has good taste "" or at any rate, your kind of taste. (If you're interested in mapping similar musicians and finding music similar to what you already like, try the search engines at LivePlasma (www.liveplasma.com) and Gnoosic (www.gnoosic.com/tripex.php) sometime.)

Pandora is no-fuss in comparison to Last.fm "" no downloads, though it does require a US zip code since it can legally only offer the service to US citizens. (If you don't live in the US, you could leave; or you could do a Google search for US zip codes, not that I would ever suggest you lie to Pandora.) It's much chattier, telling you that it chose a Tina Turner track to match your Macy Gray selection because they have "similar vocal footprints"; but it isn't as easy to add multiple artistes to "your" radio station as it is with Last.fm. Like the other new kid on the block, Soundflavor (www.soundflavor.com), though, both Pandora and Last.fm are addictive. Yahoo! claims that its venerable Launchcast does a better job than any of the new players, but my personal experience is that its customisable Fan Stations offer mostly mainstream picks, and sneak in far too many promos.

So how good is customisable radio? Unless it gets messed up by the record companies shoving in barriers or forcing promos down our throats, pretty damn fantastic "" it's like owning your own radio station, without having to do those annoying ads.