PianoBar: Pandora without all the Flash
Over the last few years I've grown rather accustomed to listening to my Pandora while working, even upgrading to PandoraOne so that I can enjoy my music without interruptions 1. However, I found myself avoiding Pandora earlier this year. Why? Pandora uses Flash for the web and Air for the desktop, presumably in order to annihilate the battery on my laptop. 2
The problem isn't Pandora though, it's Flash. What if I could use Pandora without Flash? Going a step further, what if we could take this opportunity to bring Pandora to the command-line?
Enter PianoBar, a command-line client for Pandora. Not only does it not use Flash, but since I usually have a terminal open, it's only ever a ‘C-a space’ away3. I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys having both Pandora and battery-life. Works on Mac, Linux, and Windows.
Happy Labor Day. Our regular series will resume next week.
Footnotes
When I say “without interruptions”, I'm referring to commercial interruptions, not day-to-day, hair-on-fire, or environmental interruptions. PandoraOne can't solve those other problems. ↩︎
We're talking three to four hours difference. That's almost half of my battery. ↩︎
‘C-a space’, or CTRL-A followed by space, is a shortcut for cycling through open sessions in the terminal multiplexer “screen”. ↩︎