Open Pandora Application

Open Pandora is a freeware application that adds features to Pandora, the famous music service that finds new music of similar taste for you. Pandora itself is designed to work only in your browser making it rather uncomfortable to work with in my opinion. Enter Open Pandora.

The tool adds functionality to Pandora like the ability to minimize Pandora to the tray with the tray icon tooltip displaying the song that is currently playing. It offers full control from the tray or multimedia keyboards (play, pause or skip) and has some rather unique features as well, namely the ability to send song information to last.fm, Microsoft messenger or xfire.

It adds global shortcuts to the operating system that you can use to control Pandora without opening the software or the web page. It enables you to change stations, hide or unhide the main window, or control playback of songs that are currently playing. Oh, one more thing that I almost forgot to mention - it displays the songs lyrics in an external window as well.

Some of the features that Open Pandora provides are:

• hide to tray and continue playing
• full control of the player functionality from the tray menu
• support for multimedia keyboards like the Logitech G15 keyboard
• display lyrics in browser window
• global shortcuts

Update: The last Open Pandora update dates back to 2013, which could mean that it is no longer compatible with Pandora. I can't test this unfortunately since Pandora blocked access from users from outside the United States.

A lot can happen in those years though, and it is very likely that there will at least be some quirks and issues that users may experience when trying to connect to Pandora Radio. It does not instill confidence in the program either that the last available version of it is available as a beta version only.

Verdict: If you use Pandora, you may want to give it a try if you don't like the browser controls.

Advertisement