PandoraMan brings free tunes to the Mac
One of the functions I most miss on the Mac is the ability to stream music from my Zune Pass subscription. Sure, I could fire up Parallels, but I don’t want to deal with the extra heat and battery usage it brings. A quick search for something similar to Pandora’s Box on the Windows side yielded PandoraMan for the Mac.
PandoraMan only does one function, but it does it well: it simply provides the Pandora interface outside of the browser so you can listen to tunes. I assumed I could minimize PandoraMan to the Dock, which I can, but there’s a problem there: it will only play one song while in the Dock. When I maximized it, it began playing again, but I don’t want to use screen real estate all day long for it. A simple Command-H on the keyboard hides the app and it continues to play, so I’m all set. I’ll be on the lookout for a Pandora widget or other similar app with more features in the future, but for now, I’ve got music I like. It’s uncanny how well Pandora uses "music genomes" to determine what I want to hear; amazing!
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Good find Kevin! Works very well and a very small footprint, too.
Interesting thing- if PandoraMan is minimized to the bar when a song finishes the next song won’t start until you open the window back up. I’ll just keep it open all the time. :)
OK, how many other folks are wondering if James read the WHOLE post. ;)
There’s also the AOL radio player that is quite nice on the mac… When a song starts, it appears as a 50% transparent window on top of everything for a few seconds… Nice to hear radio without commercials :)
ftp://download.newaol.com/mac/AOL_Radio.dmg
Kevin, you said you wanted a Pandora Widget? Try this one:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20173
Be warned though, it takes up *a lot* of screen real estate!
Also, nikooo: If you’re a growl user, PandoraBoy has support for it and shows nice (customisable) messages whenever he changes tracks.