Pandora Radio

[simon]

If you havent seen this new take on Internet radio, check it out:

www.pandora.com

I can get the main page with the player on it working in a web widget, but they also off a cut down page player, much more suited to working inside CQC.

The URL of this seems to be:
http://www.pandora.com/?cmd=indexmini

But when I put that into the web widget I get a different page, which is the same as when I put it into FF.

Anyone web clever enough to see where its going wrong?

I did find the direct link to the swf (flash file) but putting that URL into the web widget brought up the flash player, but it complained of network problems...

[Jonathan]

Try this URL:

https://www.pandora.com/radio/tuner_7_2_0_0_pandora.swf?_tunervar_host=www.pando ra.com

[simon]

Thank you, that works perfectly :)

I take that back. When I open the link in a browser all is swell.

However, if I use the CQC web widget I get errors:

A runtime error has occured, line 0: object expected

[beelzerob]

How are you actually using Pandora? I think I'd also like to have it as an available music source.....however, I don't know how I'd do that in my setup. You can't pipe Pandora's output to a specific audio channel like zoomplayer. So it's going to basically play in the "primary" channel of whatever PC it's on, right? That also means that I couldn't even select Pandora to play off a remote touchpad interface, because doing that would cause Pandora to play off the touchpad...not some other PC.

[simon]

Yep, it is playing on the PC,which outputs to my zones, so its a case of all or nothing.

[beelzerob]

Dang...I like it, but I'm not going to dedicate a PC to it...and worse, not be able to control it from some other PC.

[Squintz]

http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=880

Yup I heard of that :)

[simon]

Now I am confused.
The URL that you use, according to their site, is old. The new one is the one I first started playing with. Although it works entered directly into browser it doesnt seem to work in CQC.

The link to your screenshot isnt working.

Thanks though, I am glad that we can do more with it.

[Squintz]

I'm not sure why the screen shot is not there anymore. I guess thats what I get for using free image hosting services. I will take another snap shot if I remember and add it to this thread. I have not use pandora in a while since it is so limited in control.

[beelzerob]

Well, here's a thought....

could Pandora being played in an Internet Explorer window be controlled by the App Control plugin? If so, then that would allow it to be controlled from a separate interface, and you could play it on whatever PC you want.

Then you could use this (http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/rocketfm/index.php) to treat it as a separate input, via FM radio. Interesting idea, though you'd still need a single PC's output devoted to this. I have enough spares laying around......but still.

The other options I see is getting one of their $250 squeeze boxes (http://www.slimdevices.com/dev_pandora.html). Ugh...no.

[simon]

Wont go the FM route, the sound wont be good enough.
If Squintz got it work and directing the sound we should be able too.
I dont even need to do the sound bit, just launch the mini player without errors.

[Rolecgroup]

Well, here's a thought....

The other options I see is getting one of their $250 squeeze boxes (http://www.slimdevices.com/dev_pandora.html). Ugh...no.

Whats wrong with a Squeezebox :)

I've been a slimdevices user since v.1 of the old slimp3 - nearly 4 years later and still a central part of my whole house audio system.

One of my best HA/Audio investments i ever made - if it hadnt had one of those and their early almost one to one support mailing lists i'd never have found out about the wonderful world of HA :)



Dean.

[simon]

I've been playing with this some more.
It seems that by using the http://www.pandora.com?cmd=mini URL I can get it to open once okay. Then if its re-opened I get the error message.

The other thing I notice is that the first time it opens I get adverts along the top, the next time no adverts; could it be this causing the problem?

[simon]

Found a stand alone Pandora player at last!

http://openpandora.googlepages.com/download

[Squintz]

Is this open source? Is the protocol open source? If so then perhaps it could be directly integrated with CQC in the future.

[Livin]

Just checked this out, I really like it!! I hope we can find a really nice way to integrate it into CQC

[beelzerob]

I'm seriously curious if this utility has been done at all with Pandora's approval. I'm not expressing concern about it's legality, but more if Pandora is going to try to shut it down or shut it out at some point. That would make any efforts to support it now kinda pointless.

[klindy]

Interesting idea!

Here is an article about Pandora. Unfortunately I can't find a date when it was written but it must be fairly recent.

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/pandora.htm

What's really interesting are some of the limitation based on their licensing.

First, Pandora will never play a specific song on demand; if you add a song to a station, it will show up eventually, but Pandora can only work it in at random.
Also, you can only skip 10 songs in an hour -- this is so you can't just skip to the song you're looking for.
The license also limits the number of times Pandora can play a particular song or artist in a particular time period
Here's a comment regarding the future potential for commercializing the product -So how does Pandora plan to turn academic analysis into cash? Approaching the question from a theoretical standpoint, Pandora's potential commercial success is based on an economic concept called the "Long Tail." In the digital age, where consumers can easily find the specific thing they're looking for and producers can easily provide new content for distribution, Long Tail states that directing consumers off the beaten path is a potential key to profitability. In practical terms, Pandora's current revenue model seems to involve placing advertising in the free version (no ads in there as of May 2006), charging subscription fees for the ad-free version (as of May 2006, about 15 percent of subscription revenue goes to maintaining Pandora's music license and buying bandwidth) and sending users to iTunes and Amazon to buy the music they hear on Pandora. Pandora Media also licenses a commercial version of the music-discovery service to music sellers like Best Buy, Tower Records and AOL, who use it to recommend new music to their consumers at kiosks. According to the Pandora FAQ, what the company won't do is sell their objectivity. In the company's words, "We will never, ever take money to play a song or analyze it favorably on Pandora." So selling airtime is probably out.

Pretty cool technology but I can't see them allowing something like CQC to potentially circumvent any possible revenue streams. I suppose they could offer a monthly/yearly type licensing scheme or something like that but I tend to agree with beelzerob about the potential of clamping down on this utility.

[Livin]

sent an email to openpandora to see if they have Pandora's blessing, let you know what I find out.

[Jonathan]

I doubt they endorse this. I just had a quick look inside the EXE and how it works and he has used an IE control to launch the mini player and then hooked into the IE events to be able to monitor what the player is doing so he can capture things like the song title changes etc. Pretty nice job actually. Might keep this on the laptop :-)

If his web site goes down the software will stop working because it loads the actual Pandora flash object from his own URL:

http://openpandora.googlepages.com/openpandora.htm

I assume he updates this whenever they move it :)

It also looks like it checks for updates by reading:

http://openpandora.googlepages.com/controller.xml

[simon]

I did email pandora about the possibility of adding support like they do for the Slim player.
I got a mail back saying thanks, but they are far too busy to look into anything like that!

[Livin]

Well here what I got back,

"I really appreciate your interest.
I never contacted with Pandora about having their approval.
About being shut down - There site http://mess.be that enables download of a tool that patches Microsoft Messenger, so no ads are visible. They are still here.
I don't believe Pandora will even try to shut my site down. Hiding ads you can do by resizing the browser."

Take it how you will...