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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Features, Windows, Macintosh, Web services, Mozilla, web 2.0

7 ways to listen to Pandora without a web browser

openpandora
Yesterday we posted a short article about Pandora's Box, a desktop client for Pandora that lets users access the streaming music service without opening a web browser. And our intelligent Download Squad readers instantly started sending us suggestions for alternate clients. So here's a roundup of some of the best applications for listening to Pandora without a web browser.

OpenPandora

One of the oldest and most feature-packed desktop Pandora clients is OpenPandora (picture above), which we first mentioned back in 2006. OpenPandora lets you do pretty much everything you can do at Pandora.com including listening to multiple stations, using the QuickMix feature, and giving songs a thumbs up or down. OpenPandora also has a few features that most other clients lack, like a mini-player mode that just displays the player/pause, volume, and next track buttons. It also packs a built-in proxy feature allowing users outside of the US to access Pandora and global hotkey shortcuts allowing you to control playback while OpenPandora hides in your system tray.

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Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

OpenPandora rocks

OpenPandora
So I talk enough about Pandora, the free web-based music recommendation engine and player that I seriously love. But I missed the boat when I didn't try out OpenPandora sooner. OpenPandora is a free third-party Windows app that, in a nutshell, turns the ordinarily browser-bound Pandora into something more like a full-fledged desktop media player. Okay, so not exactly full-fledged--you're still limited to the songs the Pandora server feeds you--but OpenPandora adds a ton of features that make Pandora that much more enjoyable to use. First and foremost, it wraps the player up in a window that can be minimized to the tray, which is a trick we've seen before, but a great trick nevertheless. But it gets way more interesting than that. OpenPandora also has a "Mini Player" mode that condenses the player to the basic controls (unfortunately thumbs-up and thumbs-down aren't among them) to get it out of your way. You can also control all of its functions by right-clicking on its title bar or tray icon. It has a function for copying the current artist and song title to the clipboard, and to run a lyrics search in your browser. It's has integration with Windows Live Messenger and Xfire, as well as Last.fm. You can control it with a standard multimedia keyboard or enable global keyboard shortcuts (I'm hoping someone hooks it up to FoxyTunes soon), and it has proxy support. OpenPandora is under active development and you can keep tabs on it at the OpenPandora blog.

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With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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