*celebrates*

[pebblerocker]

I have the speedy internet back. How come I always desperately want to do bandwidth-heavy things when we've been throttled back to dialup?

Last.fm is giving me nothing but good music. I told them I like The Association and it gave me The Grass Roots (<3) and The Left Banke and The Lovin' Spoonful and Tommy James and the Shondelles and now The Fifth Dimension. And I've already told them I LOATHE The Association's song Windy and they'll never make me listen to it again. I'm still slightly cross with Last.fm for not being Pandora and very cross with Pandora for denying the existence of the rest of the world, but sometimes when I hit on the right thing to tell Last.fm I get exactly what I want to listen to.

Also now that I'm using it a bit more the Backstreet Boys will become just one of many things I have listened to in the past instead of the thing I listen to more than anything and that will be less embarrassing. I'm trying not to be ashamed of liking various sorts of music which may be more or less cool than other sorts, but at the same time I'm deliberately delaying posting so I can put something other than Chad & Jeremy in the box.

I don't know how to tell how much I'm allowed to listen to music online without chewing up all our data allowance. The boy said not to use Last.fm "too much", which in the absence of information I could only interpret as "at all", but it can't be that. I lack a frame of reference for understanding how much bandwidth things take in relation to how much we've got. Gigabytes aren't something I can hold in my hand.

Comments

[jekesta]

I'm still slightly cross with Last.fm for not being Pandora and very cross with Pandora for denying the existence of the rest of the world

OH! I HAVE BEEN GOING TO MAKE THAT POST FOR THE LAST WEEK OR SO. I only found last.fm in the last week or so, I hadn't twigged that it was trying to be a pandora until then. I love pandora so much, I wish they were allowed. Last.fm is a bit weird and wants to pretend to be better and it's not better, it's just fussier. But sometimes I love it because at least I CAN USE IT and that makes it quite a lot better than Pandora. Yes.

I don't understand really how much bandwidth it uses either. I don't understand if streaming something uses as much bandwidth as downloading, I always keep assuming eventually something will explain this to me and I will understand but I don't.

::DANCES YOU::

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I should try Last.fm. I'd been using Yahoo radio for a while but they insisted on throwing in top-forty stuff too frequently, just when I was getting into a groove with the music I actually liked.

Are there different streams that tell you how much bandwidth they require? For example, sometimes you can choose between a 56K or 300K connection, which mean 56 or 300 kilobytes per second, respectively. You could then use that number as the maximum amount of data transmitted per second, just to be on the safe side. (I'm guessing that if the stream works well with a 56K connection that it would actually be sending somewhat less than that.)

Then you just multiply that number by the number of seconds you're listening, to find out how much bandwidth you used. Five minutes is 300 seconds, so:

56 kb/sec * 300 sec = 16800 kb, or 16.8 MB.

[pebblerocker]

There aren't different streams and there was nowhere on the site's FAQ mentioning bandwidth usage, but I dug this up on their forums, which suggests listening may take 60MB per hour. That sounds like rather a lot. If I listen for an hour a day that's... 1.8GB per month? I get 25, but I don't know how much of that is being used on playing on Battlenet and watching Youtube or on all the things the boy gets up to.

[adroidmortox247.livejournal.com]

I miss pandora like heck. Though I might give last fm a try.

[pebblerocker]

I'd only just discovered Pandora when they decided that being not American is illegal. Didn't get the chance to use it much before it got taken away.