Last November I mentioned a music site called Pandora. As you might remember, Pandora allows you to provide a couple of artist or song names, and then plays you music based on those artists. I love Pandora and I listen to it every day. Unfortunately it does have a couple of drawbacks.

The major one is that Pandora doesn't allow you to filter via song speed or mood or anything. So you might put in a bouncy group, like Sugarland or Rascal Flatts, and suddenly find yourself listening to George Jones. Nothing wrong with George Jones except He Stopped Loving Her Today is not the upbeat high-energy song to get you started with your work.

I've found another music site that does allow you to choose songs based on mood and energy, but it has a few problems of its own. Maybe you can try them both and see which you like. Musicovery is available at http://musicovery.com/.

To use Musicovery, you don't specify a song or an artist. Instead you use the control panel to specify a range of years you want your music to come from (from the 50s to now) and the genre (you can choose all genres or any one of a range. Strangely, there's no country music!) Finally, you use a small map to click on the mood you want your music (upbeat/positive all the way to calm/dark. The map is divided into four quadrants.)

The page will refresh, showing a map of music to play, and presenting you with a variety of artists. (The more genres you pick, the more colorful and extensive this map will be.) And -- this is the part that might be hard on your wallet -- each song also links to Amazon/iTunes/eBay. (I couldn't get this to work in Firefox, it works fine in Opera.)

I listened to Musicovery for quite a while and appreciated that the music was all upbeat, without the occasional slow-sad song to break the mood (And I got way too tempted to visit iTunes and spend a bunch of money!) . But I did miss the ability to specify specific artists and to thumbs-down those songs I don't want. And I really miss the fact that there's no country genre! But I think there's plenty of room in my life for both Musicovery and Pandora. They're both going to stay in my bookmarks.