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Technophilia: 15 ways to get more out of
live to geek; geek to live.
Pandora

by Wendy Boswell

There's just so much you can do with music discovery engine Pandora: create
your own personalized radio stations, find new, original music and share your
stations with friends, just to list a few. But listening to Pandora can be a drag on
your system, and its song recommendations can go off the rails if you're not
careful. This week I've got 15 ways to get better music - and better performance
- out of Pandora.

For clarity, I've divided up this article into two distinct sections. The first will
focus solely on ways you can get Pandora to run more smoothly on your system;
the second on how to teach Pandora to fetch more of what you like, music-wise.

Pandora system tweaks

1. New browser window: In Firefox, open Pandora in a new browser

window instead of a Firefox tab. You won't use up as much memory this way.
For example, my CPU usage shot up to 39% with Pandora in a tab; Pandora
in a window? 16%.

2. Shut it down: Turn Pandora completely off about once every two hours.
The player tends to get, for lack of a better term, stuck, and doesn't do as
good a job finding your stuff the longer it plays. Turning it off and on every
once in a while seems to resolve this issue.

3. Put Pandora in your system tray: Another way to streamline your

Pandora playin' is the PandoraBrowse, a
free Windows only app that sticks
Pandora in your system tray for easy
access. Just right-click on the icon to bring Pandora up if you need to tweak
your stations.

4. Pandora standalone: Again, Windows only; download the free

OpenPandora and have
Pandora run as a standalone
interface on your desktop; it
hides in your system tray when
you're all done. I've used this
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offer is #1? Click here AND have about 27 Firefox tabs
to see our rankings! open, and haven't had any
Web 2.0's Wiki of serious browser crashes and/or
Choice memory drains yet.
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Visual Editing, Pandora music tweaks
Spreadsheets,
Blogging.

Simple Online Data

Backup
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5. Rate 5 every 60: One thing I've found that works well in teaching
Pandora to play your faves is take just five or ten minutes an hour to rate
songs, yay or nay. You'd be surprised at how much better your playlist will
come back.

6. Share your music. Take advantage of the shared songs feature. I have
found my best radio stations this way.

7. Request one song. Get more music

added to one particular station by
requesting one particular song. Adding
just one song will add over a hundred
songs (on average) to each Pandora
station. For the tightest adherence to
the kind of music that you want, just
try adding five songs to a new station
and then listen to it for at least a week
before adding any more music.

8. Add an artist's name. For a broader range of music, you can create a
Pandora station with an artist's name. This can add hundreds of songs to your
station, especially if the artist has a varied body of work.

9. Edit your stations. If you change something in your station and then
later find out that these changes have caused your station to, uh, suck, just
click on the triangle next to the station name. That will allow you to go in and
edit any changes you've made.

10. Pandora RSS feeds. Take advantage of Pandora's RSS feeds to find
even more music and share your
favorites. Your Internet friends can sub
to YOUR feeds and then you all can
trade your favorite Pandora songs,
artists, and stations. You can also find
more music by subbing to the Top
Rated feeds in your feed reader of
choice; this is a great way to find music
you might not have ordinarily thought
of.

11. Backstage. Use Backstage to find even more music you might like. Just
type in a song title or an artist's name, then click on one of the songs that
comes up.You'll see that you have the ability to create a station from that
song, listen to it, buy it, bookmark it, and even explore similar songs.
Backstage is a good way to play before you create a station; to have more
editorial control over it, so to speak.

12. Search Pandora profiles. Personally, I love seeing what other people
are listening to, because most of the
time they have such better picks than I
do. Try this query in Google to search
Pandora user profiles:
site:pandora.com inurl:people. Then
just click on any profile that comes up
and start browsing their selections. You
can add whatever you like to your
profile from each individual profile page. A similar query is
site:pandora.com inurl:artist, which enables you to look through all of
Pandora's databased artists, or site:pandora.com inurl:song, which lets
you browse through some of Pandora's humungous database of indexed
music.

13. Search for entire albums. Another Google query: site:pandora.com

inurl:album. This takes you directly to artist's complete albums, where you
can sample songs and save them to your own stations. This is just another
way to access Backstage; but I like the Google route better because I can
sample artists I've never heard of before.

14. Search for specific types of music. And yet another Google query for
youse guys: site:pandora.com inurl:album intitle:acoustic. Now, this
doesn't work as well as I'd like it to, since you're only searching for the word
"acoustic" (or whatever kind of music you're interested in) as it occurs in the
title. However, this last tip has a way around that....

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15. Search for what you feel like listening to. What if you're in the mood
for some romantic music, but just can't think of what might fit the bill? Try
using Pandora's musical classification index to find what you need. Use this
query in Google: site:pandora.com inurl:song "romantic lyrics" "major
tonality". I got some really good results back this way; Ella Fitzgerald, Hill
Street Soul, Louis Armstrong, etc. You can combine any of Pandora's musical
attributes to find exactly what you want.
Now, the trick with this is that you have to have the list of attributes up in
front of you. It would be exceedingly simple (hint hint, Pandora) to plug all
the attributes into a database with corresponding "moods"; for example, I'm
in the mood to get jiggy with it, so I'd pick the mood "Get Down", which is
linked to "Danceable Grooves", "Flat Out Funky Grooves", and "Insistent
Backbeats". Just an example.

And one more, just for fun

Now, you didn't hear it here, and this is definitely NOT endorsed by Pandora, but
you can rip music from Pandora using a few simple little DOS prompt commands.
You can read about how to do this in quite a few places on the webernets; here's
the ones that are most user-friendly:

How to Rip and Save Pandoras Music to MP3 Files for Free

Noobs Guide To Pandora's Rip Hack

Save Pandora MP3 Streams with Pandoras Jar

Again, standard disclaimers apply. How do you bend Pandora to your

music-lovin' will? Tell us all about it in the comments.

Wendy Boswell is an associate editor at Lifehacker and a big Pandora fan. Her
special feature Technophilia appears every Monday at Lifehacker. Subscribe to
the Technophilia RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

read more:
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NineTailedFox says:

Pandora's worth persevering with, then? I tried it a while ago, a few times; I'd
put in an artist, and get back two tracks by that artist and a dozen by people
trying to sound like them. I could hear that the maths was working in that
sense, but it wasn't producing a decent playlist. On virtually every occasion I
used it, I went through my skip allowance. After a while, I settled on Last.fm,
whose social model seemed to produce much better results, but I've read good
things about Pandora since. Maybe it's time to reaudition it.

09/18/06 01:12 PM

wendyboswell says:

@ninetailedfox: Honestly I think you should give it another try. It really has a
lot going for it. :>)

09/18/06 01:15 PM

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taz20075 says:

If you're a LastFM member and want to scrobble your Pandora listenings go to

http://pandorafm.real-ity.com/ instead of the regular Pandora site.

09/18/06 01:20 PM

cosmo says:

Bravo! This is why I love Lifhacker! Everything I always wanted to know about
Pandora.

09/18/06 01:27 PM

Claire says:

A Mac equivalent of PandoraBrowse is PandoraBoy. It works just fine, but it

takes up about the same amount of CPU power as running it in a Firefox tab.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22756

09/18/06 02:24 PM

minijonb says:

I love Pandora. I've been using it all year. I share my playlists and favorite
songs on my blogs. It takes a while to properly tweak a station, but the tips
you listed here are spot on.

"listening to Pandora can be a drag on your system"

Really? It's much less of a drag on system resources than, let's say, iTunes.

09/18/06 02:27 PM

pmhesse says:

I've got a bookmarklet that opens Pandora's mini player in its own window...
The contents of the bookmarklet are below, but for ease of use you can go to
my blog post on it instead (below).

javascript:(window.open('http://www.pandora.com?cmd=mini','Pandora','width=728,height=380,menu

http://pmhesse.blogspot.com/2006/09/pandora-bookmarklet.ht...

Now, once you've found a bunch of music on Pandora that you like, perhaps
you'd like to obtain some physical CDs instead of being at Pandora's whim?
Have you checked out the lala cd trading service? $1.75 per CD, as long as
trade in roughly as many as you receive. Email me if you would like an invite.

09/18/06 02:42 PM

Brad says:

Instead of trying to find a Pandora standalone app on the Mac, I instead just
downloaded Opera and set its homepage to http://pandora.com/?cmd=mini.
Then I changed the window size to get rid of all that whitespace, et voila! a
fully-functioning Pandora-only app.

Since I don't use Opera for anything else, it's just a Pandora player for me
now. The only problem is that I can't hide the window or it won't advance to
the next track (it just stops when one track finishes), but it will work fine if I
minimize the Opera window to the dock.

09/18/06 02:50 PM

Matty says:

Somehow I'd never heard of Pandora before.

Thank you! I like to have Groove Salad playing in the background in my office,
but after a while you hear the same things over and over. Pandora has opened
up a whole new box of tunes for me (pardon the pun)!

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All I did was take a look at one song I was listening to on Groove Salad -
happened to be "Boards of Canada", and now I'm groovin' all day to new
things.

Thanks again!!!

09/18/06 03:08 PM

onesix18 says:

Pandora is the most fun I've had discovering music since the early days of
Napster where I'd find a really juicy hard drive and download all sorts of new
bands I'd never heard of.

09/18/06 03:13 PM

ToddS says:

Man I love Pandora. If you aren't a fan of the Pandora 'ripping' programs (I've
never found one that works to my satisfaction), there is an alternate route you
can take to get those songs!

1) Go into the plugtmp folder in your Temp folder (mine is found at

C:\Documents and Settings\todds\Local Settings\Temp\plugtmp)
3) Go up a level (C:\Documents and Settings\todds\Local Settings\Temp for
me), and sort in the same way
4) These files are (mostly) mp3 files saved to your HD. Add the extension
.mp3 to the end, and Voila.

*Pandora switches between the two folders at random and stores 1 song
ahead. The song currently playing will be the second most recent mp3.

*Sometimes you get some non-mp3s in these folders. If you can't figure out
which are which by the file sizes, files found in plugtmp should look like
"4910631916722167898", and files found in Temp should look like
"plugtmp-13."

*Since some of these files will be in use, COPY the file to the folder of your
choice before modifying it (i.e. renaming it)

09/18/06 04:31 PM

ToddS says:

Oh, and this Greasemonkey script will get rid of all the non-essentials on
http://www.pandora.com/ and leave you with only the player.

"Pandora Tuner Only"

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5538

09/18/06 04:34 PM

ToddS says:

In my first comment, after step 1) should read the following:

2)Sort by date modified with the most recent at the top.

09/18/06 04:35 PM

Paul Stamatiou says:

I can't believe no one mentioned PandoraMan for OS X. It keeps me sane

through the day.

09/18/06 08:23 PM

Paul Stamatiou says:

Pandora Man for OS X!

09/18/06 08:23 PM

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rerunx5 says:

Here is a Firefox extension which submits tracks that you are playing at
Pandora to last.fm
http://code.yerblog.com/lastfm/

09/18/06 09:47 PM

slip says:

The day someone figures out how to play Pandora mobile-ly will be a happy
day for all mankind. I was nearly about to buy a Nokia 770 because I thought
it would work within wifi range (not hard to find on a university campus these
days), but then I found out that it doesn't support Flash 8.
Forget XM/Sirius...I want mobile Pandora. I wouldn't even care if it was just
simple streaming audio---train your pandora at home, listen non-interactively
away. Make it so! :)

09/18/06 10:06 PM

timofsuburbia says:

Share your stations here:

http://pandorastations.crispynews.com

Talk outside the box here:

http://www.pandora-forum.com

Thanks!

09/18/06 11:51 PM

timofsuburbia says:

For those of us who love Pandora, I think we need to be careful about

promoting activities such as hiding the advertisements or ripping the songs.
Tim Westergren and crew gotta live just like everyone else. Please don't make
them resort to putting the advertisements in music stream!

09/18/06 11:53 PM

Monolith says:

While both PandoraBrowse and OpenPandora work great as seemingly

standalone players, you might like to know that they are just running in
modified IE windows and take up a good chuck of memory. About 50–60 MB
from what I saw. If you don't see that as an issue, OpenPandora seems to
have a better pick of features out of the two. I also noticed a couple of debug
errors when OpenPandora started up, but they didn't seem to have any effect.

09/19/06 12:11 AM

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dep says:

Whoa! Thanks for the link to OpenPandora -- That's just awesome!

I tended to load Pandora in to its own window of *gulp* Internet Explorer. It

just seemed to run more smoothly in IE. Then I used a window manager called
Dexpot to minimize the window to the system tray.

I use Pandora at work every day. I throw on my headphones and enjoy, so I'd
say I get about 6 hours of listening in daily. I love their site. I tell everyone
about it. :)

There's another little utility called "Volumouse" -- freeware -- that lets you
control the volume of your PC from anywhere using the "scroll wheel" on the
mouse. Don't worry, it doesn't over-ride functionality, since you configure it to
only work when (and you can set these) the cursor is over the task bar, or
while you're holding down the control key. It's insanely useful for tweaking
volume levels on the fly.

09/19/06 09:09 AM

Eric S. says:

I'm a huge fan of http://yubnub.org/kernel/ls?args=pandora

09/19/06 11:57 AM

Eric S. says:

Augh, comment issues! Let me try that again:

I'm a huge fan of 09/19/06 12:00 PM

Brad Fuller says:

Thought others might interested more about Pandora and the inner workings
of the technology. My interview with Pandora's CTO Tom Conrad can be found
on O'Reilly at:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2006/...

I cover both the aesthetic/musical side as well as the technical innards.

brad

09/19/06 03:54 PM

~Karolis says:

Why did no-ne mention th greates of Pandora applications - Pandoras Box? Oh

well, at least I think it is the greatest because I have not tried others :)

http://www.cfdan.com/posts/Pandoras_Box_-_Updates.cfm

09/20/06 03:51 AM

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