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!
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.