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BlogI’m pleased to announce that we’ve released version 2.0 of the Pandora One desktop app. You’ve been telling us that the desktop app is one of your favorite features of Pandora One and it’s great to have the chance to begin the process of refining that experience.
With this release we’ve tried to keep the interface very simple while adding several of the most-requested features:
* You can now view your song history. Just click on the album art to reveal arrows to navigate through the last hour of your playlist. Thumb up (or down) or buy any song that played in the last hour.
* We’ve added a progress bar. Want to know how much is left to play of the current track? Just click the album art to reveal the time elapsed and remaining for the current track.
* Windows users can hover over the system tray icon to see the name of the currently playing artist and song.
* The app remembers where you placed it on your desktop and how loud you like your music. The next time you start it, it’s right where you left it.
* Song transitions have been sped up so you don’t need to wait long for a thumbs down to get rid of the current song.
Our goal is to continue to improve Pandora One over time. Hope you enjoy this first little step in that evolution.
Pandora One gets an upgrade: Desktop App 2.0
I love the new app, and the additional features, I have been wanting them from day one of Pandora One! I agree with the above requests for new features, but I suspect your current level of features in the Pandora One are more geared towards keeping the interface simple. Maybe a way to implement the new features may be to use interface options. A tool bar mode, a simple interface like the one now, and an advanced interface that allows all the station management options available on the website.
Keep up the great work!!
My housemate is trying to create a channel with all female vocalists … and Pandora keeps offering males.
Isn’t the pitch of the singer’s voice as important as the rest of the instrumentation? Acoustic versus electric guitar, horns versus strings, soprano versus tenor?
Everything is perfect and pretty minimalistic just like I like it. Only thing that would make perfect for me would be the ability to play the music over an alternative playback device in Windows, like say I have my headset as my main audio choice which is connected to my on board audio, it would be great to be able to playback via my sound card over the speakers. Otherwise you made a good desktop app!
Sounds great but, when can I pay with paypal?
I use debit card for real life (school books) and paypal for online life. I don’t want to subscribe until I can pay with paypal.
I saw it mentioned by someone else, but I would also like to see the station associated with the current song when I am listening to QuickMix in the desktop app. I hesitate to use the thumbs in this situation because I don’t know which station I’m affecting.
Other than this minor complain, the additions to v2.0.0 are great and cover a lot of functionality that was missing in the previous version. Thanks Pandora!.
The only gripe that I have with Pandora 1.0 as well as the recently released 2.0 is that you cannot edit stations for your quickmix station. until this feature is added, I will be a disappointed user.
Great improvement, sounds like to me! Is the price twelve months or calendar year (ending in December)?
Great update! Thanks!
I have always loved Pandora and am always telling friends about this amazing station…but now I am being hit in the wallet. I agree with mjfrombuffalo, I do not mind the ads as much when I can listen to my choice radio stations.
I have personally owned 78′s, 4 tracks, 8 tracks, reel to reel, cassettes, 45′s, 33′s, CDs, flash drives, tube radios, crystal radios, transistor radios, and satellite radios. I have never experienced something so terrific as the Pandora Radio. Not only have you actually heard of and have the songs I select, your accuracy on the genre is spot on. I just discovered Pandora and I am now a huge cheerleader.
Rickery
Thanks for this site, I love finding new bands in certain genres. Instead of having to just search “pop punk” on myspace or whatever, I go here and put in my very favorite bands and it finds ones that sound similar. You’re awesome.
LOVE the app!
I have an idea: sometimes the album cover is incorrect for the song (i.e. Kiss Me by Sixpence none the richer on Sixpence none the richer shows the album art for Natalie Imbruglia’s album – white lillies island) . You should make a way for us to be able to submit a different album cover to the song.
Whenever we submit it, other users who view the suggstion could thumb up or thumb down it, and whenever it hits a certain threshold of thumb ups then the album cover is changed. Only one user thumb up per suggestion, that would enforce enough variety to ensure the validity of a suggestion.
It’s unfortunate that there is not a way to edit the quickmix from the desktop app.
It has become such a part of how I listen to music that I had to uninstall the desktop app and go back to web until I see a resolve.
LOVE PANDORA – keep up the dev work.
Good update, except is there any way to make the song popup an option? I would like something that is unobstrusive, especially when I am listening to music and working.
Thanks.
pandora haz gewd updates
Still waiting for social media integration: Last.fm scrobbling, Twitter, Facebook.
Just started using Pandora (tonight, actually), decided it was great, subscribed, and installed this application. However, I quickly searched around for alternative apps and am now using OpenPandora instead. No hotkey support is a huge disappointment. Not sure how anyone could stand using a standalone media player – one they HAD to pay to access – without having the ability to quickly pause the song without bringing up the window when there are FREE alternatives that do so much more. OpenPandora also scrobbling to Last.fm was simply a bonus, not a requirement of mine.
Add Variety button to the desktop app. Love it, love it, love it.
Excellent product, however it owuld be nice if I could turn off the notifications when the song changes.
This would make it easier to use in a corporate environment and less intrusive — you can turn off outlook pop-up notifications,a nd I’d like a similar feature.
@Noel
That’s a cool idea, we’ll definitely keep it in mind for the next version of the Desktop App.
@Luke
Hope you’re enjoying our new Facebook and Twitter integration!
@Mike
The popups are optional! Click on the triangle menu, then choose “Preferences”. Make sure “Display notifications on song change” is deselected.
so what did they fix or change with 2.0.1? for the desktop app.
We have downloaded the pandora one app and when we set it to quick mix it only plays rap. Is their a update available? We are running 2.0.1.
@drew — It sounds like you may have only selected rap stations to be included in your QuickMix. For more information on how to select which stations for your QuickMix, see this entry on our FAQ: http://blog.pandora.com/faq/contents/483.html
Are there any plans for hotkey support? Fiddling with OpenPandora just to keep it working while I’m paying for Pandora One is irritating but hotkeys are a necessity for me.
I just bought it, and its worth One for the quality alone! My only wish is the ability to add variety without needing to go into my browser.
Keep up the good work pandora, been with you for years.
Is there a way to keep Pandora ONe subscription player always on top of other apps on the desktop?
Pandora desktop app is nice, but is still rather buggy and lacking in a few areas:
First, and most importantly, the Pause function. Fine for “pausing”, but when the pause function needs to replace the lack of a “stop” button, it becomes VERY problematic. Since there is no Stop in Pandora, the only thing I can do when I want to turn the music off for the night is “pause” then go to sleep (or close the program, but we’ll get to that in a minute). When the computer wakes up the next morning, it’s still paused on the last song – big woops. Obviously the data connection is long gone after an overnight pause. But who does it blame when it lost the connection to the server overnight during the pause? It blames my computer, saying, and I lol: “Your computer is having trouble connecting to the network”. Oh, is it really? Because the moment I hit Retry, it works fine. It just lost the connection because it had been paused for too long… it should be smart enough to detect that during play and move on.
Now about that “close” thing. The default option for the close button is, infuriatingly, to simply hide itself in the tray (I HATE app windows that hide in the tray! Ugh, I really do! Piss on people suggesting putting it in the tray, nothing is more irritating th–… er, /rant). So what happens when you pause the music and close it? It hides itself. Paused. So, when Pandora isn’t open, what do you do? Double click it. But it’s already hiding in the tray. So it brings itself back up, paused. “Play”. It plays the next minute or so of buffered song, then again places the blame on your shoddy computer for “having trouble” connecting to the network. Huh?
Plus, application-level volume control is a burden to society that really needs to be abolished. We’ve already got about 10 different volume controls at any given moment: application, system, speakers, and who knows what in between. Having an application-level volume control is just a waste of code, as any familiar computer user would be shoving app volume to max and using the volume keys on the keyboard or buttons on the speaker.
And speaking of keys, there’s another thing that could use improvement: global (optional) support for the ubiquitous and well-documented multimedia function keys. Look at the top of your keyboard, chances are you’ve got some. They should be supported by anything claiming to be a “music player” (globally! if I have to switch back to the application itself, I might as well be clicking the controls instead, right?). Would be nice to have.
Just a few cents of “things that would make Pandora desktop infinitely better”.
ok no improvements since 2009 and a hundred commments. Have you guys learned that Pandora is NOT listening?
Can you please add some way to disable the pop-up that appears at every song change with the desktop application? I don’t need to know the very instant the new song plays, if I’m curious, I’ll open up the window to read it.
It never fails, just as I’m trying to click something on my work or application, the pop-up appears and I end up clicking it and closing what I was working on.
try to adjust your Growl notifications
Ditto on that Misty… need to be able to disable the song info pop-up box.
Misty, Phred,
It’s easy, Go to preferences and un-check “Display notifications on song change”
I’ve been using the Pandora One applet since it was released. I’m still not happy with the performance while I’m doing other complex tasks on my computer and I often have to shut it down when using other software. My computer is a higher end workstation so I know it’s not hardware related. After everything I’ve read elsewhere, I believe that Adobe AIR is just a resource hog. I’d really like to see this fixed as I love everything else about it. I listen for 8 to 10 hours/day while at work.
Turning off that song title notification for the Pandora 1 desktop app was NOT easy. I had change my Google search at least 5 times, and spent roughly 20min searching blogs and forum’s. Finally at the end of this forum Misty/Phred was able to clarify it. ‘Check the up triangle on the Pandora app, click preferences, and uncheck Display notifications on each song’ . Sounds simple enough, but obviously there are others out there who found this frustrating and difficult enough to complain about.
Basically, the song title notification is nice, but should be easier to turn on and off ( because it get’s annoying quick ), or at least change preferences easier.
Love the latest version! One thing I’d like added to the app is an “add variety” option/button. If I want to add something to a station I still need to open the website. Thanks!!
Any way to stream Pandora from my iPad to multiple receivers via Airplay? I know you can stream iTunes to multiple receivers such as and apple TV and Airport Express at the same time, but the iPad Pandora app only allows streaming to one device? Is there a fix somewhere?
Hipshot
@Brian There’s no way to stream Pandora to multiple receivers via Airplay. As you mentioned, you can stream to an Airport Express or Apple TV from a supported iOS device, but not to two of them at once. Great suggestion, though!
BIG BIG DITTO ON THE “ADD VARIETY” OPTION TO THE DESKTOP APP [M.D. Waters at October 30, 2011 3:44 AM]… Has this app not been updated for 2 years? Quick Mix repeats, repeats, repeats… not really functional even with dozens of stations… I have found that simply adding one variety to a station gives MUCH BETTER RESULTS… but have to login to the website to do this??? Yes, I am a paying customer!!
Hi Patrick,
We appreciate the feedback. We are definitely working on feature parity, so stay tuned!
-Jeff (Pandora)
I lost my music completely.I paid for this service
Make it so it can be minimized and hidden in the system tray, please.