Ares

Exactly.

It's actually incredibly easy, I've done them a few times before. You make a textbox and, whenever the text is changed, you clear and re-populate your list, adding only items that contain the search string. Great usefulness:effort ratio ;) I wonder, does Pandora let you get the list of song seeds /thumbed-up songs for a station? This might allow us to see how similar two stations are, by the number of matches.

New version appears to be working great. Could you add the option to filter by station name? Perhaps one of those instant-filtering textboxes. I'm also swimming in a lot of stations and they'll hell to manage - half the time I can't distinguish between the one-off station I listened to for a few minutes a long time ago and the long-lasting, great stations that pull in a ton of great songs. Mostly that's just Pandora - they don't offer much in this regard. But we could. It'd be interesting if Saver2 could track the thumbs up/thumbs down ratio for each station as you listen, and display that next to the station names. So you could see which stations are great and which ones suck.

Happy Birthday!

Just here to report: updating the "normal" way definitely works now. This was probably fixed a while ago but I was doing it manually to get around it. Thanks :)

My bad. Thanks!

Could you add hotkeys to rate the current song up or down? I love using PS while playing Age of Empires, but can't really Alt+Tab out easily. (Or are they there already?) Thanks :)

It no longer appears in the station list.

Has QuickMix broken?

I've got a little problem: After I rip music with S2, I add it to MediaMonkey, which moves the file into its own directory structure. Is there any way to prevent Saver2 from ripping this same file again?

Is the Pandora client fully separate from Saver2? If so, you could release the source for just that, and I could look into it to get an idea of what sort of callback functions I'll need, and it would give me a jump-start for getting the project started. Even if the source isn't well commented, it'll still be a lot faster than trading prototypes back and forth. My goal is to create an entirely separate client that looks like this -- beautiful and a bit glossy. Maybe not as huge but you get the idea. However if that's not your thing, you can still use the default client (which will keep linux compatibility). Either way, good separation from the code layer (which communicates with Pandora and plays the music) and the UI layer (which I care about) is essential. We don't want a bunch of outdated forks running around.

Both of you guys should look into WPF; it was designed expressly for this purpose (using the Windows UI but developing your own skins/components). Instead of only having the standard Windows components, plus a few feeble options to customize them, everything has been redone from scratch. It's all flexible. If you develop your own button, it's no less usable than the default Windows button. It's vector-based (so it resizes extremely well), and uses a new graphics library (allowing you to use effects such as transparency, reflection, aero, etc. with no performance hit). It even has classes for media playback, which might save you some work on porting mplayer2, ZZG. Furthermore, the code is separated from the design (that was the whole point). The downside is that you'd have to learn a new markup language, and WPF apps are slow to start. I might also help with UI, though my skills are more about simplicity, and making things intuitive and functional (which PS could use). For example, I mocked up a new setup screen in Winforms:

I've noticed that the automatic update bug is still occurring in the newer builds. Here's how to trigger it. Download a fresh version of Saver2 and install it. Make sure "set IE proxy" is ON. Run SProxy. Push an update. SProxy will notify you, download it, then quit and run the installer silently. SProxy is closed, but the IE proxy is still set. The installer will try to download the update and silently fail. If you open the Sproxy folder you'll see that it's mostly empty, save for the installer. It was becoming too much of a hassle, so I just decided to disable the IE proxy function. But I know that's not an option for everyone. Unsetting the IE proxy before SProxy quits should fix this. Alternatively, instead of downloading the installer and having it download the update, you could try downloading the new binaries directly from SProxy, then close out, make the switch, and restart. This would fix the next bug, and, because SProxy would only have to be closed for a split second, would make the whole update process seem much faster. One other installer bug: it doesn't remember your settings for the "components" section. I don't use the desktop icons, and every time I update they get put back. Other than that, it's been working great! Let me know if you ever get around to releasing the source. I'd love to make a really nice alternative player in WPF, with large album art and some sexy aero glass. :) I knew as soon as you implemented the Amazon art downloader (which is working very well, BTW) that I wanted to make a player that would use it.

As far as fetching album art goes, you might find AlbumArtDownloader useful. It's an open-source C# app that fetches artwork from dozens of sources, including Amazon.

Working pretty well so far! Two things I've noticed... When PS restarts to update, it launches the installer, which tries to download the update, but fails! This is because IE is still set to use PS's proxy, but PS isn't running any more. Could you have the Pandora Client autologin on startup, if you have it set to remember you? That'd be sweet.

Awesome! Let me know if you ever get around to a source release. I have a lot of ideas I'd like to try out. We could even set up a SVN!

ZigZagJoe, I just want to say that this is a fantastic program. I've been using it since March or so and it's always worked really well, but I never got around to thanking you. So thank you, and have some monies! Now for a question: do you ever plan to release the source? The reason I ask is that I fancy myself a pretty good UI designer, and I've noticed that the Sproxy/PS configuration can be a little confusing at times. I'd love to take a stab at improving it. I think the Miniplayer in particular has a ton of potential. I have a ton of other ideas, too. :) I've noticed that it's often hard to get the latest information about PandoraSaver, because the first post in this topic is really long (so it's hard to scan for updates), and this topic often gets cluttered with bug reports. Just starting a website (or even easier, a blogspot blog) and posting updates there would make it a lot easier for us to keep up with you, and for newbies to discover PandoraSaver. But that's not all! I think I could write an autoupdater, too (heck, you already have most of it done: the downloading portion in the startup code), which would be sweet. If Pandora breaks PandoraSaver, PS would just magically fix itself after a few days! Let me know how I can help. :)