Popular online streaming music service Pandora started it all. They grew out of the Music Genome Project in January of 2000 and haven’t looked back. Pandora has a web streaming option, is built into many home and car audio products, and, of course, can be found on iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. While their algorithms can be hit and miss in my experience, they’re still the go-to app when Spotify, Grooveshark, or Rdio don’t quite cut it.
Today, Pandora updated its iPhone app with several new features and a nice face lift to boot.
One of the keys to keeping Pandora’s radio-like music mixes playing is the “thumbs up/Thumbs down” mechanic. If you like a song playing on the station, hit the thumbs up button. Don’t like that song, artist, or genre? Thumb it down. This gives you some control over what gets played in the mix. With the new update, you no longer have to hit the thumbs up button while the current song is playing. Just like in the web app, you can see your song history, swiping left and right to move within it. Then you can customize your music stations to a mich higer degree while on the go.
Lyrics are now also available in the iPhone app – just tap the square icon in the upper right from the Now Playing screen, and Pandora will drop the lyrics for the currently playing son underneath the album archive area.
You can now access your bookmarked songs and artists from the iPhone app as well – the feature is accessed from the station list screen. Just tap on Bookmarks to preview, purchase, or create a station from your favorites. In addition, you can tell Pandora to stop playing that one annoying track over and over again. Tap the new triangle between the thumb buttons and then tap, “I’m tired of this track.” Pandora won’t remove it from your station’s genome, but it will lay off the overplaying for a while.
All in all, these are some much needed additions to an app that was already pretty fantastic.
