ZigZagJoe

Correct. Re-encoding will just increase the file size, and not increase the sound quality (in fact it is possible to lower it due to transcoding). Turbo mode just tricks pandora into playing more music (because the files it gets are only 5 seconds long). So, you get a new file every 5 seconds, internet connection permitting. Finished implementing the tray icon for SProxy, implemented a drop-down to control tagging mode (always, once, or never), and am finishing off improved blacklisting (supports forming a blacklist from directories).

Yeah, was going to. I'll update in a bit.

Ooops, double post.

Probably. I've had it happen occasionally when running lots of pandoras in turbo mode. Usually refreshing fixes it Yeah, I don't have it mangle the miniplayer page as i figured it is more likely used for listening (and pandoras run in hidden tabs for ripping).

The song data contains a gain attribute, but nothing is done with it in PS (it is discarded). Couldn't find a proper place for it. (in metadata)

Updated the currently uploaded version with a delay of 3 seconds (needed because sometimes the encoder locks the file for a sec anyways). Also, going to add a tray icon.

The reason you can't use auto reload download button and a few other things in low bandwidth mode is because how it works: when SProxy receives data, it immediately passes it on to the client program (more or less streaming) - thus, when the plugins are called (after all transferring is done) it's too late to make any changes to what is passed on. (autoreload injects code into the page itself, as does the download button). Music volume is the same regardless of selected volume in the player (i usually run with it at zero in turbo rip mode). Hrm, keep trying if you would yeehaa, I need that before one to determine the type of container it is in and the after to do some checks on (to see if it is a fault of the program, or the player, or what) Probably going to add support for blacklisting dirs - code to list every file in a dir and reduce that to a series of comparables already exists - used for deleting blacklisted songs. It would be simple to make it support adding to the blacklist like that.

Haven't the faintest. Get a before and after if you can (of the m4a), a log snippet, and the original mp4, then upload it somewhere. I'll take a look at it.

LAME does, but any program coded in the last 10 years should honor the exit code. Added name customization and the better encoder stuff, along with some other small changes. Download at http:// zzj.itf-inc.com/SPPS1.000c1.006d.zip (OUTDATED - see first post)

I'll add options to customize the names. It's simple to do (already implemented, just need to put a input box for customization). I'm probably going to change the default extension to m4a as well - while mp4 is a valid extension for audio only files, when you can declare something to be strongly typed you should. If you were to use turbo with mp3 (used to be able to in previous versions) it would pile up songs but with Pandora adding songs at one per 5 seconds while it converts them one around each 30 seconds (on a ripped pc); it's obviously a loosing battle. When it reached the limit and started reaping older songs(that are still processing) bad stuff would happen. To compensate, you can run multiple Pandoras at once. (up to 4-5 would be okay) It's not freezing on tagging - it just doesn't have a message that notes when it is done cycling (and so that can be the last message for a while). I'll add a message. The best way to handle if you have dupes in other dirs is to export a playlist with the songs in question (in m3u format) and have that be used as a blacklist. Rename it to [something].blacklist.txt and place it in save dir, with blacklist enabled. (you can have as many blacklists as you like.) Hit reload blacklist in settings or restart sproxy to apply. As long as they are named in a similar format to the songs to be downloaded names they it will perform the same function. underscores, spaces, dashes, punctuation, and paths are all ignored. C:\Documents and Settings\zigzagjoe\Desktop\pand\The Real McCoy\Another Night\The Real McCoy - Run Away.mp4 The Real McCoy\Another Night\The Real McCoy - Run Away.wav The Real McCoy - Run Away.aac The_Real McCoy_-_Run_Away.mp3 all turn out to the same blacklist pattern, which is the "real mccoy run away". It normally expects a 100% match rate however you can change this under advanced settings. However, don't set this under 85% or it will start matching when the artist name is the same (and two words or more) and the song name is one word. If you mean by clipping blank space at the start and end of files, I find that there is none at all usually. (I can't remember a song with significant blank space, certainly not one starting with it) Misc note: once you pass 4000 or so songs sniffed in PS, you should restart SProxy as it seems .NET is leaking memory, even though there is no objects there (i used a memory profiler). Can't be fixed. It seems to tend to start slowing down at that point as well. On closer in spection, it seems to have a huge number of strings allocated (16k), however, those are automatically garbage collected... Figured out a better way to check if the encoder ended happily ever after or died a horrible death in the lava- the exit code, which will be 0 on a successful exit. As there is this i have made the window hidden again (though you'll have to guess if something goes wrong. a tradeoff.)

It launches a window evidenttly because of how i have to handle channeling output - if something goes wrong it could write the output of the program to the log. Still looking for a better way to handle it. Maybe i can make it launch minimized; that would be better than nothing. By the sound of it, you did not change the extension used (from mp3), so it is saving it with a wrong extension and is trying to tag it with the wrong method. You will want to change that to .m4a, mp4 or .aac. (under advanced settings, next to the encoder boxes). Also, it waits up to 5 minutes for the conversion to complete - if it is exiting early, with a bad output file something isn't working right. However, the encoder is still producing an output file so it thinks all is fine and dandy. I'll have it echo output regardless, i think. It probably is not hanging at tagging the mp3 files (I'll make a distinction when it is done processing a file) I am contemplating making it spawn a tray icon of its own, but, it can't use the P icon that pandorasaver makes as SProxy and Pandorasaver are fundementaly two different pieces of code, with minimal interwork between them. (SProxy essentially performs the same function as fiddler did, with some extra bits) I'm looking into getting a firefox portable sorted for this to have ready-made, but their new format for portable apps is giving me a bit of trouble. I'll get it sorted in the next few days. The IE setting must be changed as that is what flash uses to determine how it routes requests. If it does not set that stuff then flash will circumvent SProxy for most requests, and so PS does not work. It's also somewhat handy for people who use IE/other browsers that use IE settings (chrome). @boem: glad you like it :)

Yeah, I checked it. Didn't see any problems (and i had tested it again too). Going to add some checks just in case, I think.

Just some debugging info - confirming what i already suspected - pandora from time to time sends malformed responses. It's just in a nice display so I can tell exactly what was received. You may safely ignore it. Actually, by looking at the response, it appears to be a server failure as it generated the same error when it tried to get a nice error page (and on the subsequent request to the same server). So a few of these errors in a row from time to time evidently is a fault of pandora (good to know, i was worried something was broken in the header-parsing)

By graphic i meant the large image showing where stuff is. Just checked the album art, and it was all correct. The caching is just to memory - it saves the image that Pandora got and the URL that got it. Then, if a song played has the same album art URL as one that is stored in the cache it uses the cached image rather than re-download it (which would be traceable).

Standalone version released! download it at http:// zzj.itf-inc.com/SPPS1.000c.zip (OUTDATED) Huzzah~ New features of note: Blacklisting! prevent files from being downloaded + delete already existing Standalone and such. No external programs required. Low bandwidth mode, for tor and slower connections. Use this if Pandora requests songs multiple times, or if you know your connection speed to be lower than 50kb/s. Bugfixes up the arse (of course.) I'll update the graphic in a bit. Now i just need to find me a moderator to sort the title (now fiddler-free) With this, the fiddler version is tentatively obsoleted and discouraged from active use (I'd rather not have to backport everything, even when they are rather similar)

@boem+Stokastik: i've added support for proxy dns resolving (to allow tor to handle resolving of the addr). Also, i tested "hinting" (basically dropping the first line immediately to try to stop it from requesting more) and it did not stop pandora from complaining. I'm thinking I will need to introduce a low bandwidth mode in which it streams all data to prevent this. (this will disable turbo mode, but Tor could hardly support that anyways). Edit: low bandwidth mode does indeed fix it. However, the download button, auto refresh, miniplayer check-breaking, and ad removal options are all disabled. (because the response is immediately written to the server, can't change what is already sent!) after messing with tor, i've got the timeout sorted by drastically increasing the timeout. (these are also able to be edited in the config file - defaults to 60secs) note to self: blacklist deletion. After that's done and tested working can probably release. Edit. Tried hotspot shield. It can successfully chain, yes, but it doesn't allow the CONNECT method. Thus, Pandora can't load via it. HTTP proxy chaining is completed regardless.

What player are you using? If you are using WMP to play, it does not have built in support for reading AAC tags (and will show nothing).

If you can get the log it would help a lot. (see this diagram: http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r49/zigzagjoe/sptut.gif ) A screen of SProxy's main window + a log exerpt would be good as well. (at the time you are trying to load pandora)

Actually, the multiple requests is caused by the flash applet being impatient. It might be timing out itself. I'll look into seeing if i can get it to stop doing that (i notice it sometimes even though it downloads very fast here) Turbo mode doesn't actually change how it downloads, it just changes it so when a song is completely downloaded and is about to be sent to the flash applet it swaps the song data with a 5 second long blank aac file. I'll look into getting HTTP proxy chaining again, as it seems "Hotspotshield" is much faster than TOR and provides the same function (fooling pandora). @boem: I'll try implementing some DNS backups (specifically, the ability to look up dns via socks4a/tor) for lack of a better idea. I'll upload the newest (still-beta) version in a bit once i've made some changes.

Hmmmm, something is very wrong if it can't resolve DNS. What is your internet setup like? do you connect through a proxy normally, nevermind for pandora?

Have you tried putting 127.0.0.1:8888 as a nonspecific proxy server, that is, use it all the time? Also, are you seeing the various requests being routed through SProxy? (they will show in the main window and log) for the PAC files, you would use return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:8888" instead of socks (wind up with the same PAC i had in the first post) to have it route through SProxy and PS. And yeah, i noticed that i had firefox set to send local requests through proxy too, hence that worked for me. Oops.

I put that at the end of my post - I'll grovel to a mod sometime and see if i can't get the threads sorted (and the title changed on this one, when ready). Got the blacklisting stuff implemented; just need to do final testing. Note to self: Hotspotshield uses a HTTP proxy. So I guess i should implement http proxy chaining after all (hotspotshield being a free anonomizer vpn dealie that also allows pandora to work, much like Tor) Is anyone running this on a vista machine? I just tried it on a friend's comp and received a cryptic (read: nonsensical) error :X and would like to know if it is a machine-specific problem or all around vista. After figuring the vista situation out, and doing a little bit of testing on other machines i'm more or less ready to call the standalone SProxy version ready for proper release and the fiddler version officially obsolete.

I ended up adding a field for the path to encoder (%path% will be replaced with the path to the directory SProxy was launched from; and will always end with a slash, example "%path%lame.exe"), a field to edit the arguments (such as "-h -b %bitrate% %wavtmp% %out%"), and finally a field in which to put what extension should be used for the output (ie "mp3", "aac", "wma" etc etc), which it uses to check for the existence of the output file %wavtmp% was the wav file decoded in step one with faad, %out% is the name used for output. it uses the full path enclosed in quotes for both, to prevent errors relating to spaces.

So, you basically want to use another encoder in place of lame (to convert the HE-AAC which pandora gives us to LC-AAC)? It wouldn't be particularly hard to implement, just add a few tags like it handles %bitrate% (which is the bitrate selected under common options.) It will be part of 1.006; the new standalone version which will be released soon. I've finished implementing this. Waiting on adding a blacklist feature to ignore certain songs + more testing of the standalone (fiddler-less) host before release. The version number will also be incremented.

Provided you can get .NET on said liveCD (and ofc have some writable storage for saved files) it should not be hard to do.