Quick in the Mix

It's really hard to overstate just how much the QuickMix feature changes the way I listen to Pandora (33 days until the Day the Music Suffers an Embolism, by the way.). Since I've discovered that little button at the bottom of my station list, it's become the default way I listen to the radio. And, yeah, now that I've opened the Pandora's box, I just can't go back to listening to radio the same way. Having my power go out and my cellphone go dead from lack of recharging forced me to listen to the old terrestrial brand and, man, it was like moving from the highway to the surface streets.

Basically, in case you don't know, Pandora lets you seed a station with any combination of artists or songs that you like. Obscure to top 40. You can have a huge variety of influences or keep things nice and niche, it's up to you. It then plays songs which the Music Genome Project says should be similar to those seeds. Like a “real” radio you don't have any control over which songs can play, no fastforward, no rewind, no nothing although you have a limited number of skips per hour. And you can thumbs up or thumbs down and bookmark songs. But chances are you'll stumble across something you like and had never heard before along with some old favorites.

What QuickMix does is, instead of having to flip from station to station or combine them into one big super station (Since you can only have one station for each seed. You can't create, say, ten Chali 2Na stations or a station for every track off the latest Eminem release or whatever.) to suit your tastes, it lets you select any number of you stations. And then it'll randomly select between them when playing your next song. It's like putting your Pandora on shuffle play. And it lets you switch between a more focused station and a broader sampling of your musical interests with ease. Really cool feature that feels like it's been there all along.