David Kellam

Well, it looks like Pandora’s access policy has changed yet again. When I last posted, you got 10 hours free then had to pay & register with a US credit card/address. Then you needed to have a US IP Address (which I do :P) to even listen beyond a few songs.

Now it’s ad-supported! Fantastic! You just minimise the window and never see the ads. They also insert audio ads, but I’ve been listening for half an hour and haven’t heard any yet. This is so much better than radio! (N.B. They still have a premium version with no ads).

If you’re really keen, you can also grab the raw .mp3 files out of your Flash cache. They all have strange names of course, but you could always sort by date and correlate with your pandora playlist. Of course, if you’re going to go to that much trouble to violate the terms of service, you might as well just use Limewire. But this way, Pandora does all the recommendations based on my somewhat limited knowledge of popular music and makes it easy for me to either listen to similar music again (through their service), or identical music if I take the time to scrounge my cache.

I’d pay if they actually let me…

DRK

P.S. Friends, ask me for proxy access if you need it ;-). Ask hotmail if you need spare e-mail addresses

DRK

P.P.S. I have no idea what, if anything, has replaced LimeWire these days. I refuse to install such apps unless sandboxed inside a virtual machine (e.g. VMWare or the recently-freed Virtual PC). I also refuse to waste my time that obviously.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 10:50 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.