Streaming music comparisons and quality

I listened to the Pandora premium service for a long time but have switched over almost completely to MOG. It's a well thought out interface that lets you control completely what you listen to but provides several ways to branch out to music you might not know about. The breadth of their catalog is remarkable, as well. Their 320 kbps stream sounds quite good, better than the 256 of Pandora One.

I agree with Vhiner, the services aren't directly competitive, which you prefer depends on how you want to listen at any given moment and to some extent on what kind of music you listen to most.

I subscribe to Mog, Pandora One and eMusic and have used Spotify occasionally. Pandora is great for throwing unexpected but interesting new music at you and the algorithm works pretty well as long as there's a lot of similar music in their catalog. If you favor distinctive and difficult to classify musicians, however, the playlists can drive you crazy.

I love Anouar Brahem, for instance, but an Anouar Brahem channel on Pandora serves up a lot of insipid soft jazz and the more time you spend training it the more often it plays the same few performers over and over.

All those sources mentioned are great resources and, fortunately, they have different strengths. Even if you pay for subscriptions to all of them the volume of music instantly available makes them an incredible bargain.

Rockyboy - I assume from your system description that you're using iTunes to control the music library and stream it to your downstairs listening room.

With Mog and Pandora you would be using a browser or their desktop applications for access to their online music libraries. To stream those wirelessly to an Airport Express you'll need a application like Airfoil to handle the streaming. It works in conjunction with the Mog or Pandora applications and lets you direct the sound to as many Airplay devices as you have. Airfoil is a very nicely done, versatile product.