Diary of a geek

December 2010
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
   
22
   

Andrew Pollock

Categories

Other people's blogs

Subscribe

RSS feed

Contact me

JavaScript required


Wednesday, 22 December 2010

Find of the day: pianobar

Cube-mate and friend, Kynan, put me on to pianobar today. This thing is 100% sheer awesome. A console Pandora client!

No longer do I have to find the browser tab that Pandora is running in to pause it, or to see what the hell it is I'm listening to. Nor do I need to worry about Flash crashing.

It's also extensible in that it can call out to an external program for various events, such as starting a new song. This makes desktop notifications of what the hell you're listening to trivial.

It'll also read commands from a named pipe, so at work, where I have this crazy Microsoft Natural Keyboard with all sorts of multimedia keys, I've set up evrouter (which isn't in Debian for some strange reason) so that I can pause, skip and like/dislike using my keyboard (regardless of what application I'm in). So I can just kick off pianobar in a terminal somewhere and forget about it. This is so cool.

Interestingly, it also doesn't play any advertising, so I've finally pulled my finger out and paid for a Pandora One account.

Overall, this makes for a fantastic desktop Pandora client. Now I just need to figure out why I get weird HTTP errors from it at home...

[20:08] [tech] [permalink]