Ever use Pandora? Ever use Pandora...on AIR?

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Ever use Pandora? Ever use Pandora...on AIR?

by Drew Olanoff Jun 3rd 2008

The holy grail for die-hard Pandora users has been a desktop application. While there have been several third party solutions, Pandora has announced the launch of an official desktop client.

Using Adobe AIR, naturally.

It's a trend we're seeing, as we mentioned before, and it's nice to see Pandora jumping into the game.

You can use all of the features that you'd expect from the website, the ability to create channels, listen to your current channels, and navigate the social networking features as well. It's slick and fast, and being able to use Pandora without a browser is quite a treat.

If you're not sure, Pandora is a music streaming service that is dubbed the "Music Genome Project", which basically means that they have trained music experts who give "DNA" to pieces of music, so that they can recommend music that you'll really like. They base it on song, artist, or lyrics.

Being able to see what's playing, change channels, or create new ones right on your desktop has been a private dream of ours for years.

They want your feedback, so install it and test it out. Knowing those guys like we do, they'll listen to the community and build it up to what the people want. The way it should be done.

Welcome to the desktop Pandora!

Tags: adobe air, AdobeAir, desktop, music, pandora

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Sridhar said 9:50PM on 6-03-2008

Can we upload mp3s using this desktop client?

Drew Olanoff said 9:08AM on 6-04-2008

That's not really how Pandora works, they stream songs based on your likes and interests.

kingkool68 said 10:06PM on 6-03-2008

Any keyboard shortcuts to thumbs up/down tracks, skip songs, and raise/lower the volume?

Drew Olanoff said 9:03AM on 6-04-2008

Great suggestions, you should hop over to their blog and let them know!

vic said 5:06PM on 6-05-2008

There are no global keyboard shortcuts yet, but the local keyboard shortcuts still work. However, you need to have the AIR window open to use them.

spacebar: Toggle Play / Pause
right-arrow: Skip to the Next Song

plus: I Like this Song
minus: I Don't Like this Song

up-arrow: Raise Volume
down-arrow: Lower Volume
shift + up-arrow: Full Volume
shift + down-arrow: Mute

Drew Olanoff said 5:14PM on 6-05-2008

nice call vic!

michas_pi said 12:15AM on 6-04-2008

I'm using it on my iMac G5 with Leopard and it's working fine, albeit it is eating up a lot of CPU time.

Drew Olanoff said 9:04AM on 6-04-2008

I'm sure they'll work the kinks out, let them know what you think!

michas_pi said 1:44PM on 6-04-2008

@Drew Olanoff:

Will do as soon as I get home from class.

Matt S. said 1:39AM on 6-04-2008

My gosh.. OpenPandora beats this with two hands tied behind its back.. Its just a single website browser.. Thats all this app is..

Surely, they could come up with using the power of Adobe AIR to flash ads on the screen every hour or something. So they can reduce the size of the app and only show the player itself.. They could cut half of it off if they did that.

Im kinda disappointed.

Drew Olanoff said 9:06AM on 6-04-2008

It's definitely a starting point though. I think you should let them know exactly what you want, because that's how Pandora builds its site, they listen to people like you.

Remember that once you have it installed, they can update all the time and you'll get notified.

Matt S. said 1:26PM on 6-04-2008

I did tell them. I had a nice long post on their page. But they changed my post to something I did not say. Theres only one Matt S. on there and what I did say was basically what I said on here plus more. I even had a positive comment on there..

I guess thats how they treat a user with a negative comment.

Matt S. said 1:26PM on 6-04-2008

Matt S. said 2:13PM on 6-04-2008

I appolgize for the triple post..

I was contacted by pandora about my comment and I was wrong. They did not change my post.

matt said 3:04AM on 6-04-2008

Lets hope for Drew's sake that Weblogs Inc doesn't drug test ;p.

Drew Olanoff said 9:07AM on 6-04-2008

Jon Stewart would be proud of that title.

Sean Hackbarth said 3:47AM on 6-04-2008

If they tie this into Last.fm so I can track what songs I heard I'm sold.

Drew Olanoff said 9:09AM on 6-04-2008

Oooh that would be tasty eh?

Mimzy said 1:31PM on 6-04-2008

Great, yet another awesome application that I can't run on Linux...

Lucia @ Pandora said 2:26PM on 6-04-2008

Thanks Drew and commenters, for your Pandora-related feedback!

Keep it coming. :) We welcome your comments (positive, negative, and miscellaneous) on our blog, and you can also send any and all thoughts on our beta desktop app here: beta-feedback@pandora.com

Thanks for beta testing! We weigh listener feedback heavily when we prioritize how and what to change, Pandora-wise.

Thanks,

Lucia Willow, from Pandora

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

View more Time Wasters