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Widget Watch: Pandora, your personal Dashboard DJ

by David Chartier Oct 19th 2006 at 7:30PM


Pandora is a really interesting streaming music web service that helps you discover new artists based on the qualities of the music you like, such as the beat, artist's influences, genre, and much more. It's a pretty exciting experiment based on the Music Genome Project, and Download Squad wrote up a more in-depth overview last year while Pandora was still in private beta, though the service has since gone public for everyone to enjoy.

Which brings us to the Pandora widget, which brings the goodness of this slick experiment to Mac OS X's Dashboard. However, after briefly tinkering with this, those who are very discriminating about their system resource should beware: this is one of the most resource-intensive widgets I've come across, hogging about 44MB of real memory and about 450 of my Virtual Memory on a 1.83 Ghz MacBook with 1GB RAM. By comparison, even a fairly active widget like iStat pro only gobbles up about 5.5MB/340MB, respectively. Still, if cycles are of no worry to you, this widget seems to work just as well as its browser-based counterpart, so Mac-slinging Pandora fans now have another option to get their experimental music listening fix.

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Pandora is a really interesting streaming music web service that helps you discover new artists based on the qualities of the music you...
 

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MOR

So, this widget doesn't serve much function since the buttons don't work....

Also, did someone use a Leopard preview to make this?

October 21 2006 at 5:42 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ed

When you register for a pandora account it asks for a zip code, just enter a US zip code. I doubt they honestly care themselves, they just have to show that as far as they're aware their users are US citizens.

October 21 2006 at 9:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
R Muffet

Pandora doesn't do country checks, maybe you're thinking of another service.

Tried the widget, starts playing okay, but all the controls are unresponsive for me: sometimes the mouse cursor changes and the buttons highlight, but clicking does nothing (just drag the widget around).

The only way I can change station is by closing the widget and dragging it out again. Keystrokes to skip a track do work though.

October 20 2006 at 8:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
JkEw

@ 10

Works for me and I live in Vancouver,Canada.When it asks to enter your zip code I entered a N.Y zip btw Pandora is great!!

October 20 2006 at 12:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
luis

waaaaah! i have a 12"PB, 1,5Ghz with 1,25GB RAM.
i wouldn't mind the memory usage, but 20% of my CPU?!? that's way too much...

October 20 2006 at 8:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jennine

No way to stop or otherwise control the music once it starts. None of the controls work. You have to kill the widget to stop it.

Wasn't worth even the time to download it.

October 20 2006 at 6:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
fischziege

open for everybody? last time i checked out pandora, it was open only to us-citizens... has that changed?

October 20 2006 at 5:19 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sdfjkl

There's also PandoraBoy which runs in the dock as well but lets you control Pandora fully via the Apple Remote.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22756

October 20 2006 at 2:40 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Leo

Pinback!

w00t!

October 20 2006 at 12:38 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
msr

Woah... that's so weird. I was just wondering last night if there was a widget for Pandora.

October 20 2006 at 12:02 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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