Run Pandora in System Tray
I've published some articles on Pandora before; For those who have not heard of the service let me explain what it does in a couple of sentences. Pandora is a music service that looks at your choice of music and tries to find music that matches this taste. You are free to add a song title, an album or artist and Pandora creates a radio station that plays music that it believes is similar to the music you have selected. The music plays then in your browsers window until you close it.
It would be much nicer if Pandora could be minimized to the system tray instead, especially on pre-Windows 7 systems as they do not use the icon-only display in the taskbar. The main reason here for that is to avoid that background apps clutter the taskbar so that you have more space for important windows and programs. Dan created a small application that makes it possible to run Pandora in the system tray. His tool acts as a wrapper application and works fine.
There are of course other means to achieve the same result. Some days ago I wrote a story about rbtray which basically is able to minimize every window to the system tray. This should work with Pandora as well.
Finally I also found a way to import the Pandora radio stream into winamp. You might want to take a look at this article as well.
Update: The program has not been updated in the last years. The latest version has been released in August 2006, which makes it likely that the program is no longer working properly.
Pandora has changed a lot as well. The company has locked out users from all over the world. The only Internet users who can access Pandora right now are from the United States. There are however ways to bypass Pandora's country restrictions which you may want to look into if you want to use the service from a location outside of the United States.
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I actually found a great windows app on http://www.pandorasbanana.com/. This thing is awesome. Allows you to minimize pandora radio to your system tray with unlimited play and has a bunch of other cool features. My favorite is the option to startup with windows while minimized to your tray. It’s pretty minimalist but it does the trick. It’s also tiny and work on a flash drive. Just copy the exe after install to your flash drive. I’ve tried other wrappers but this is by far the smallest footprint. It takes up very little RAM compared to the IE browser… Anyway, I sound like a commercial. Enjoy..
reel deel?
rip off?
it’s open source…
pandomax give you all.
not do that and that and that and that and that and that and that and that.
simple. make it simple.
users don’t like 11 steps to run program.
Umm why don’t you get the real deal pandomax is a rip off of our program pandora.jar it can be
found at hak5.org.. Anyone that has used pandomax will notice the skins say hak.5
now you can save all songs you listen with pandomax.
http://pandomax.com
I’m using Open Pandora right now…it is terrific.
There is another application called OPEN PANDORA. It has minimize to tray, but also it shows song and artist name in the title bar and in the tray icon tooltip, and it sends played song details to Microsoft Messenger