xltrader100

For those looking for a working version, I've posted 7.3.1 on this free file server. On the page that comes up, click in the upper left where it says Download File. This link will disappear after 30 days of inactivity. http://upload.ohshare.com/v/8926801/pandor....7.3.1.zip.html This is the same zip that I downloaded from wildandbad back in July. I refer you to my post of 4 Sept. Nothing has changed since then except Firefox is now 1.5.0.7. Pandora continues to run flawlessly 24/7 with never a bad tag. I don't do last.fm, iTunes, album art or lyrics. Just auto grabbing mp3's with correct tags is all I need. I've noticed a conflict between Pandora.jar and uTorrent which makes it necessary to not run both at the same time.

MaxRabbit wrote: OMG that must be my problem!!!! I can't believe it; I've had trouble with wrong names for a LONG time now, but I am ALWAYS changing stations!! That must be my problem, I almost gaurentee it!! ----------------------- I don't think so Max. I went through all the same grief with wrong names that I keep reading about here until I finally lucked out on a config that has been rock stable running 24/7 for over 2 months now. Never a hiccup and never a wrong name. There are a lot of different versions floating around, but 7.3.1 Beta is the one that works for me. It used to be available here http://wildandbad.com/pandora.beta.7.3.1.zip but I just tried it and the site is down. See if you can find this somewhere else. The pandora.jar size is 137087 bytes. I'm running Firefox 1.5.0.2 and Flash 8,0,22,0 CDDB lookup ON Cruise control ON iTunes OFF last.FM data OFF style: Pandora all user names and passwords blank Changing the default location of the Pandora folder works OK without messing anything up, and Port 8000 works for me so I haven't tried changing it. A few tips on usage: Check Firefox with TaskManager several times a day and restart it when it gets over 300 Mb (with 1Gb ram). Session Saver automatically restarts Pandora where it left off. Set Songs before Reload to 0 (meaning no reloads) during the daytime and to 20 for overnight. You always lose the first grab after a reload unless you grab it manually. Don't click on Thumbs Down or Skip Track until the Grab is complete. This is guaranteed to mess up the naming of the next song. You're allowed 6 Skip Tracks per hour per station and Pandora keeps track of this even after a restart of Firefox. No problem changing stations. I haven't found it necessary to clean out Firefox cache. The autocomplete in Firefox makes it a simple 3-key sequence to get localHost running. ( L - downArrow - Return) Don't try to reorganize or clean up the files in the mp3 folder until you're sure you're completely finished downloading. Pandora will overwrite any existing files with the same name so you'll never wind up with any duplicates, but as soon as you move anything out of that folder you'll find (if you keep on downloading) that you have a never ending job of trying to reconcile duplicate files. Actually, it's not quite true about Pandora always overwriting duplicates because sometimes the album won't be recognized and you'll wind up with the same song inside an album folder and the same song outside with no album shown. But it's not a big problem.

Just as a heads up on "coming attractions", after installing the new Firefox 2.0 beta and trying to run Pandora hack, a message window comes up saying that a new Flash plugin has to be installed, and gives a link to install Flash 9. I immediately trashed 2.0 beta, awaiting resolution of the incompatibility with Flash 9.

I've gone back to 7.3.1, which works well. With 7.3.2, besides Backstage not working, the Grab (including manual Grab) was hanging up waiting for Lyrics to download, even though I had Lyrics turned off.

charakter_baby wrote: Barley!!! wrote: nothing really, I just took out a check for recent files. The Backstage button doesn't seem to work any more with 7.3.2. Just me?

Pandora in O'Reilly Digital Media by Brad Fuller 08/17/2006 http://tinyurl.com/oqd4g Some snippets from the article: With the exception of the final user interface, which runs in Flash, Pandora is based primarily on open source software. The foundation is the PostgresSQL database running in Debian Linux, with the client tier developed in OpenLaszlo. The server-side infrastructure is mostly Java running in a J2SE servlet container. Database access, the playlist generator, and station and feedback management all live in this Java tier. Pandora creates playlists with a "matching engine," written in C and Python, for each listener station. This engine builds the low-level linkage to the "source" music (the music that listeners indicate they like) and the music that actually gets played (a mixture of what the listener explicitly indicated, mixed with music that the Pandora service believes listeners will like). The replication system is Slony. The listener runs the Pandora service in a web browser, seeing a mixture of HTML and Ajax techniques for ad delivery and Flash for music delivery. The player, which Pandora calls the "tuner," runs in Flash; the user interface was written with OpenLaszlo. Because Laszlo has been around for six years, it has a long track record in Internet time--certainly longer than its closest competitor, Adobe Flex. OpenLaszlo has been open source for about a year, inspiring a vibrant developer community to rise up and extend the platform beyond Flash. This is a very interesting development in comparison to the closed-source universe of Flash. OpenLaszlo allows developers to create in the OpenLaszlo environment and deploy to either the Flash runtime or to DHTML. Because web browsers don't necessarily provide native mechanisms for playing audio, Pandora required some type of plug-in. Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and Flash were the obvious choices. However, Flash appealed to the developers because it didn't come squarely from the two main camps, Apple and Microsoft. Flash does a nice job of providing audio as well as graphics across the three main platforms--Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. the sequence from the point when listeners log on to the point when they start hearing a song: 1. The client initializes the web page. 2. The Pandora Tuner (the music player) authenticates with the Playlist Server, passing along listener credentials. 3. The Station List for that particular listener is returned to the Tuner and rendered on the screen by the Tuner. 4. The listener selects a particular station for playback. 5. The Tuner makes a request to the Playlist Server for a sequence of songs to play. 6. The Tuner receives a list of playlist fragment descriptors and begins sending audio requests based on the information received from the Playlist Server. 7. The Tuner stitches those audio resources together into a stream of music. 8. The Tuner plays the first song.

How would this work as an alternative to restarting Pandora every 20 songs? And I'm thinking especially about unattended overnight operation with Cruise Control On. When song no. 20 comes up, and after the grab, program in a Thumbs Down on whatever is playing. This would provide several benefits, with 1) and 2) being the biggies: 1) It would satisfy Pandora's activity monitor 2) It would eliminate the current skipping of the grab on the first song after a restart 3) It would immediately start a new song and not waste time on playing the current song all the way through 4) It would prevent the Thumbs Down song from playing again on that station, which is what I want since I've already grabbed it. --Roy

This was mentioned in a post upstream but I don't think with enough emphasis. One sure way to produce a corrupted mp3, meaning either the wrong tags or the wrong selection or with a shortened (few hundred kb) file length is to take one of the actions that will stop the current selection during the 15 sec. before the grab. This includes a thumbs down, or a "Don't play this..." or "I don't like this..." or a change of station. (Doesn't happen every time for a change of station, but the others are quite reproducable). The next grab will nearly always be corrupted. After that it straightens out and things are ok from then on. So don't be too impatient to trash that turkey that's just started playing. Related to this (I think) is what happens when the song counter causes Pandora to reload. It always starts the reload after only a few notes of a new selection, i.e. exactly the condition described above. The effect is to nearly always skip the first grab of the newly loaded Pandora. At least it doesn't corrupt anything, but the first grab almost never happens (and sometimes the first two). Would it be possible to delay the reload until after the grab? Not sure this would fix it but it's worth a try. --Roy