Filed under: Audio, Internet Tools, Widget Watch
Widget Watch: Pandora, your personal Dashboard DJ
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.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jetty said 7:41PM on 10-19-2006
There is another option. It's called PandoraMan. It plays Pandora without using a browser. I keep it in my dock. Check it out
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21464
Reply
Taxman said 7:49PM on 10-19-2006
Where is the widget? When I click on the link above, it goes to an old site about Pandora but I do not see a widget.
Reply
Mr A. Nal said 9:00PM on 10-19-2006
How exactly does "hogging about 44MB of real memory and about 450 of my Virtual Memory" mean that it's CPU-intensive? ;)
Reply
Steve Shaner said 9:03PM on 10-19-2006
Psst, CPU refers to the "Central Processing Unit", the processor that actually computes.
Talking about memory usage as "CPU-intensive" is a bit misleading and makes you look naive to technical readers.
Reply
mandel said 9:20PM on 10-19-2006
I have tryed the widget on my g4 eMac, and it is not very good. I have to triple click every time I want to do anything, on the other hand I have tryed the PandoraMan and is preaty sweet. So far for the eMac I'll stay with pandoraman, although I'll give the widget a try on the MacBook.
Reply
David Chartier said 11:41PM on 10-19-2006
Guys: the 'CPU-intensive' bit was a typo. It's ok, please return your insults to their full and upright positions.
#2: The 'Read' link at the end of the post links directly to the widget, and I've fixed the 'Pandora widget' link as well. Sorry about that.
Reply
msr said 12:03AM on 10-20-2006
Woah... that's so weird. I was just wondering last night if there was a widget for Pandora.
Reply
Leo said 12:39AM on 10-20-2006
Pinback!
w00t!
Reply
sdfjkl said 3:02AM on 10-20-2006
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
Reply
fischziege said 5:53AM on 10-20-2006
open for everybody? last time i checked out pandora, it was open only to us-citizens... has that changed?
Reply
Jennine said 7:01AM on 10-20-2006
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.
Reply
luis said 8:04AM on 10-20-2006
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...
Reply
JkEw said 12:10PM on 10-20-2006
@ 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!!
Reply
Reg said 8:17PM on 10-20-2006
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.
Reply
Ed said 9:05AM on 10-21-2006
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.
Reply
MOR said 5:42PM on 10-21-2006
So, this widget doesn't serve much function since the buttons don't work....
Also, did someone use a Leopard preview to make this?
Reply