Pandora's Box - listening to your own web music channel

review by ClifNotes, Sept 2006, permalink

October of last year, I spotted Pandora at Sarah's blog and quickly went to http://pandora.com to try it out. Since then, two other readers here at Freewarewiki have also recommended Pandora. Thank you Tiffany and Nob.

What is Pandora? quote from pandora.com

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It's powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Just tell us one of your favorite songs or artists and we'll launch a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe ... advertising-supported version which is entirely free. Over time we'll be incorporating ads into this version of Pandora.

Typically, you have to log in at the Pandora website to listen to your personal station. Now I have found another way to listen. Dan Mackey, a programmer in Ireland, has written up a program that makes using Pandora very easy and enjoyable. He even included a way to view song lyrics.

Quote from the author of Pandora's Box

I love listening to music while programming, sometimes I'm in the mood for Faithless, then some Prodigy and lately a bit of Johnny Cash. The problem is I have exhausted my supply of tracks so rely on Pandora - Genome Music Project to find me similar music I may never pick up in the shops!

The problem I found with Pandora is that even with a minimal window, it meant there was another Internet Explorer / Firefox window open cluttering up my screen and I accidently either close the browser or refresh the window! I always thought it would be cool to have it run in the tasktray like Winamp and so took an hour off this evening to develop what I am calling Pandoras Box

Requirements: This will run on most Windows machines and was explicitly tested and developed on WindowsXP with IE6.

Go and see Pandora's Box