Jango Radio is like Pandora, but without the country restriction

When Pandora Radio first appeared on the Internet back in 2006 it was free to use for all users regardless of country of origin. This soon changed when the country restrictions kicked in which effectively shut out users from outside the United States. While there are ways to bypass that, for instance by using the Media Hint extension for Google Chrome, it is limiting the service's exposure significantly.
Jango Radio has been around since 2007, a year after Pandora first emerged on the scene. The service offers pretty much the same as Pandora: enter the name of an artist into the search form to create a new radio station that is customized based on that artist, or tune into one of the existing stations instead which are popular currently.
What makes Jango special is that it is not country-restricted. While I cannot guarantee that it works from every country, it appears to work just fine from many at the very least.
According to Jango's help section, the service has access to more than 30 million songs that users can listen to. A couple of quick tests revealed that popular artists are usually found without issues while you may not be as lucky in regards to lesser known artists. That's however only really a problem if you like to listen to niche music and even here, the selection is usually quite ok.
Once you have created your own radio station or tuned into one, you are taken to a page full of information and the music player itself. Here you get biographic information, links to pictures and videos, options to buy music, a selection of stations that cover the band and links to similar stations that you can all tune in.
You can add songs to your favorites or ban them right from the player interface. Banning them makes sure that they are no longer included your rotation which makes it an effective tool in blocking songs from ever playing again on Jango.
You can click on the edit station link on the same page, even if you are not logged in, to add other artists to the station and to change how similar songs need to be to be played on the station.
If you add more than one artist you mix music so that you may get a selection of fine tuned songs in the end. You can tweak the matching algorithm to limit the variety of music or increase it instead.
While you can run Jango Radio in the background at all times once you have started to play a station, you can also make use of the various features that it makes available to you.
This includes the artist's biography,options to load the lyrics of the song currently playing, as well as access to pictures and videos featuring that artist.
There are no limitations in regards to the stations that you can create, or the artists that you can add to individual stations. What may be even more interesting is the ability to skip as many songs as you want, as there does not seem to be a limit imposed on you either in this regard.
If you want to use Jango on mobile devices, you can install the Android app or the iOS application.
Downsides
Advertisement appears to the main revenue source of the website. That in itself is not problematic even though you may find several ads scattered around on the page. The service will in addition to that interrupt music once a day to display an overlay ad to you.
After several songs, you will also receive an overlay to register an account, which is displayed to you whenever a new song gets played. Creating an account is free on the other hand and you are free to sign up by email or Facebook, or skip the overlay registration form each time.
Verdict
If you like Pandora Radio but cannot really use it because of its restrictions, you may find a more than suitable alternative in Jango Radio. The site is not a 1:1 copy of Pandora Radio, and that is definitely a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
While you may need to create an account to reduce some of the sites - few - nuisances, it is done in a matter of seconds and provides you with access to additional features that you would not have otherwise have access to.
If you like music, this is definitely a site that deserves a place in your bookmarks.
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Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?