Nobody knows that the annoucement will be but the concensus on the web, and I’d agree with them all, is to expect a subscription-based streaming service.

To be honest this could be an extremely good thing to help get people away for their frankly awful effort that is the iTunes software itself.  It remains to be seen though just how mobile network carriers will see the move.  The majority of purchases through the iTunes store will now take place on devices such as the iPhone and adding a streaming service could place significant stresses on mobile networks that have already had to introduce usage caps for some smartphone users.

Some people are also speculating that the move could see the beginning of the end for the MP3.  To be honest I would say that mobile and home broadband connections need to get much faster and more reliable for this to happen, though new technologies are already beginning to be introduced that can help on the road to this.  The CD and vinyl LP were hard to kill off because people liked a physical ‘thing’ they could hold and collect.  It can very easily be argued that people won’t have any such attachment to a digital music or video file.

Whatever the announcement, and however (un)forgettable it turns out to be, we’ll bring you the news here at gHacks.net

So in this article I am going to show you how to install the Pandora Screenlet so you can stream pandora radio to your Linux desktop. I will warn you, however, that the Pandora Screenlet is very much in beta (currently in release 0.1.01), so you use it at your own risk. But don’t worry, using a beta version of Pandora Screenlet will not steal your soul or your data. It might act a bit buggy at times though. You’ve been warned.

Prior to installation

You don’t have to take this step, but I find the whole Pandora experience much better if you sign up for an account. This way your stations can be saved so you don’t always have to search for your favorite type of music.  You will also have to have the Screenlets tool installed (covered in the article mentioned above). With that installed you will find the ~/.screenlets directory. This is where your downloaded Screenlets are stored.

Installation

The first step is to download the Pandora Screenlet archive file. Do this from the Download link on the product main page. Once you have downloaded this there are two ways to install the Screenlet:

• Unpack the archive into the ~./screenlets directory.
• Use the Screenlets installer.

I have always found using the Screenlets installer is a much more reliable method of installation. To use this method you need to right click on the Screenlets icon in the Notification area of your desktop and select Install Screenlet. This will open a window where you navigate to the downloaded Pandora Screenlet .gz file. Select that and then click Open. This will then install the screenlet.

Figure 1

Now you have to add the screenlet to your desktop. To do this right click the Screenlet icon again and select Screenlets Manager. From this new window, scroll down until you see the Pandora icon. Doublt click on that icon to launch the Pandora Screenlet (see Figure 1).

Of course you can sign into your Pandora account as well as do a bit of personalization. To configure the screenlet, right click the screenlet border and select Properties. In the Properties window you will find two tabs that have configurable options:

Themes: This is actually not usable yet because theme support is not working.

Options: Here you can configure the size, position, opacity, keep above/below, and much more.

Final thoughts

If you are a fan of Pandora Radio, and you are a Linux user, this Screenlet is one of the best options (outside of keeping a browser open at all times).

Some, like LastFM, offer a comprehensive service in which you have a profile and can interact with other lastFM users. Bands can be commented on and reviewed and based on your listening habits new bands will be suggested to you.

The latest start-up to cause the biggest buzz has been Muxtape, a highly minimal music may upload only 12 songs to their ‘muxtape’. It’s a struggle to condense your entire collection into just a dozen songs, but what it does do is guarantee the quality of people’s muxtapes.

In fact it would be a great way to discover new songs, except that a search function is not included in the service. Luckily someone else started up MuxSearch recently.

If you like these minimal song sharing services then why not try Tiny Song? First simply search for the song, select it from the list it suggests. From here you can send the link to a friend to listen to.

The link will open the song up in Grooveshark and begin streaming instantly. You’ll find it sure beats telling someone to go download a song, then having to download it for them when they can’t find it, then having them not like it anyway.

Forget feature filled startups, these are the way to go.

Sopcast is an alternative. You can download the freeware from the developers website or use one of the mirrors to do so. The download from the main website did not work for me, not a good sign, and I had to use one of the mirrors to get the program. Sopcast offers free tv streams over internet using P2P technique which means that the quality not only depends on the source who is streaming the tv signal but also on the peers that share their bandwidth as well.

A pleasant suprise was that the website was completely translated to English, which is not the case for most other Sopcast-like-tools out there. Once installed you can login anonymously and click on channels to see the big channel list.

Channels are sorted into categories like Sports and HiFi Music. As you can see on the picture to the left there are some characters that are not displayed correctly, most likely because of missing Chinese language support on my system.

Clicking on a channel opens a new window to the right of the program that is connected to it. You receive some basic information about buffering, speed and which program you are viewing.

It normally takes some time to load. Just remember that the quality of the output not only depends on your connection speed but also on the connection speed of your peers.

The tv stream playback began quickly but the buffering was not done yet. It is normal to get some small interruptions during the first minutes of playback. This should stop once you are connected to more peers.

Sopcast does not have that many US channels like TVU Player. It offers ESPN, HBO Movie and CNN. There are probably more at different times in the day and some minor ones that I missed but it’s rather mediocre.

All the football fans should also take note of CCTV 5 which is a Chinese Sports channel broadcasting lots of European football. (that is soccer in North America)

Conclusion: If you like sports you may want to try out Sopcast and won’t miss tvu player that much. If you like movies and tv shows sopcast is not really the right tv streaming application to use.