Our Verdict
ThePandora streaming - music serviceis incredibly popular , withover 100 million user , and for estimable understanding : You order Pandora about an artist you care , and the service creates astationfilled with music by that creative person and , based on relationships install by theMusic Genome Project , medicine standardized to that artist ’s medicine . It ’s like wireless but with a few major reward : You debar the invariant commercials ; chance are you ’ll like the station much better than anything on the wireless , because it ’s based on music you know you wish ; and Pandora ’s algorithm is so good that you finish up discovering mountain of Modern euphony by artist you may not have even see of .
There are currently lashings of media role player and home - media components with Pandora build - in , as well as Pandora apps available for most computing platform , include Io , making it possible to take heed to Pandora almost anywhere . But to listen to Pandora on your Mac , you need to either keep a web browser windowpane open to the Pandora internet site ( which , for now , use Flash ) or set up thePandora One Desktop App , which requires that you first instal Adobe AIR . Pick your poison .
That is , unless you take reward of a third - party Pandora client for Mac . The most full - featured is surelyPandoraJam($15 ) , which lets you take heed to , apply AirPlay with , and even record your Pandora stations . But if you do n’t require all those features , check outPandaBar 1.2.1($5;Mac App Store connectedness ) , which lets you listen to your Pandora station using an unobtrusive carte - bar player .
Launch PandaBar and enter your Pandora account name and parole , and you get a cunning panda - with - headphones ikon in your computer menu bar . get across this ikon to access PandaBar ’s compact player window . The first sentence you apply PandaBar , it ’s set to the first station , alphabetically , you ’ve configure on the Pandora website . ( In the future , launch PandaBar automatically starts playback of the last post you take heed to . ) Click the Play clitoris to start up listening , or click Stations to pick out one of your other place .
you could sort the stations list alphabetically or by creation date ; if you ’ve make new station on the Pandora site , click the Refresh clitoris to update the listing . unluckily , you ca n’t make raw station from within PandaBar — you’ll still need to visit the Pandora internet site , or apply one of the official Pandora apps , to edit your stations list .
The actor window exhibit the album cover for the current cart track , the cut name and artist name , and a procession bar showing the current track ’s progress and remaining time . You also you get Pandora ’s hallmark thumbs - up , thumbs - down , and track - omission buttons , the first two for rating the current runway ( to give the service more data for customizing your station ) and the last for skip to the next track in the station . snap the album incubate to view , on the Pandora website , more info about the creative person , and click the petite verbaliser icon above the record album handle to adapt music mass independent of your Mac ’s system volume .
While not as feature of speech - plentiful as PandoraJam , PandaBar is a great little app for listening to your Pandora stations . It ’s simple to use , it does n’t use much memory or CPU resources , and it gets out of your elbow room .
Updated 11/22/2011 , 10:50pm , to even out error about an independent volume dominance for PandaBar .
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