Notices

I downloaded pypianobar and it works great...idunno if i'm messing something up but it doesn't work in silent mode even with the volume up. Why not? The standard music player does. There are many settings where my phone is in silent and i have headphones in and listen to my music. In fact today at school my phone was on silent and i was listening to music with my headphones in.

I can't switch my phone in to the general setting just to listen to music.

Also, a nice feature i think would be the volume decrease or even mute when your headphones get pulled out. With a classic ipod you dont have to worry about it because it doesnt have speakers but with the n900, it could be kind of embarrassing if you're in a library playing pandora and your headphones come unplugged and it takes you a few seconds to turn the volume off or plug your headphones back in. There is already an app for the standard music player for the n900 but i think the pypianobar could use it as well.

Thank you!

Unfortunately that's one thing I can't really test in anyway without an N900. This just rely's on pianobar to send the Audio which is likely using whatever the system is set at. In silent mode it's turning the sound off and thus muting pianobar.

There's probably a trick around that which is what the built-in media player does but I wouldn't have any idea how to do that and no way to poke around a system to find out. I can look through some docs here and stuff and see if they mention anything... but I wouldn't get my hopes up for that one for a bit.

As for the headphone bit... I'm sure that'll have some kind of signal in dbus. I'll have to look at the docs but is another one I can't test properly since the SDK dbus doesn't work right (and I wouldn't know how to "emulate" pulling the headphones out of the SDK.)

Oh, well that sucks. food for thought i guess then. Good luck, i'll keep checking back, maybe you'll be able to figure something out

This is just a bump for testing... Come on guys - would be nice to get this up to Extras so everyone can enjoy Pandora Radio.

I agree. Any way to move this to Extras soon would be great. Minor problems I assume could be taken care of with an update later on. Pandora Radio would be a really good addition for the N900.

If you use it it would help to get some votes in the extras-testing queue.

Noob question: Which should be downloaded to get pandora: pianobar or pypianobar? What does each do? Differences? Do they work together, thus needing to download both? Thanks.

Pianobar is the work-horse. It's the one that actually controls communication with Pandora Radio.

The problem is it's entirely command line only. So you have to open a terminal, run it, and it'll list you your stations and let you pick one - and you control it completely by using keys such as "n" for next, and "q" for quit. It also won't remember your account unless you manually edit a configuration file and put your information in there.

Many people don't like being in the command line that much.. they want graphics.

So what Bratag and I have done is written GUI front-ends to pianobar. What pyPianobar (and qtPianobar) will do is run pianobar in the background transparent to the user and allow them to do commands such as Like, Dislike, Tired, next, play/pause, create and delete stations, etc - using graphical buttons.

I have also extended some things in having pyPianobar grab the album art for the song you're playing, and also having it read and write to pianobar's configuration file for you - so that it can remember your Username and Passwords and don't have to enter it in every time.

So... if space is completely critical in /opt (both packages are optified) - then you can get away with just having pianobar and using the terminal for Pandora. If you want a graphical interface to make life easier, then you'll need both pianobar and pyPianobar (pyPianobar will pull down pianobar automatically.. you don't need to manually install both.)

Hey. Fairly new to the site(mostly just been reading and not posting thus far). Just wanted to thank you for the work put into the app, it's sick. I came over from a G1 which, thanks to Google, had tons of first party apps. I was spoiled with them, but after see how good some of the apps can get, I'm enthusiastic. The app works really well, but it seems that either the program or phone gets a little bog down. The music flows fine and sound quality is phenomenal(the Android Pandora had an option for Normal and High quality, thankfully, that's no problem here), but whenever I lock or unlock the phone, it freezes the track for about a second or two. If I multitask, it seems to do the same. It really isn't anything major(especially for the price of free), but I'm just curious if its the app or the nature of the streams or something. Just to clarify, I'm on a N900.

To be honest I'm not entirely sure. Most of the actual communication is done via pianobar which opens a stream to the Pandora Radio. I haven't added any coded to deal with sound output, or integrate in with the N900 at all... it just uses whatever the system default sound configuration is.

Does the same skipping occur if you're playing an mp3? Or streaming from the website?

A better test might be listening to an online radio station? It could be something with the phone.. but I am unable to test any phone-specific issues as I don't have one. It seems like it could be related to threading and how the CPU handles multi-tasking.. as this is very noticeable on, say, the old N810. But how the default media player would work around it I don't know.

I'm glad that, for the most part, the app seems to do as you require. As far as sound quality, there is actually 3 settings for pianobar - I just haven't coded them into the gui.

There is mp3-faad, aacplus, and a High Quality mp3 that is only available for paid accounts/subscriptions. The option to change this is in your ~/.config/pianobar/pianobar file near the bottom. From the pianobar documentation:

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As a side note: In the upstream the latest version/update of pianobar has appeared to remove the internal last.fm scrobbling. It has introduced a new eventcmd scripting procedure to pass it off to third party apps instead.. I'll need to look how it all works before compiling any of the more recent changes and submitting them up. For now.. I'm leaving the version in the testing repo's there until they get tested and moved to extras - or noticeable faults found and I am notified of extras-preventing bugs.