Pandora 2.1: Control the Music from Your Keyboard

by on February 2, 2006

This is one that a lot of our listeners have been asking for… with this release we’ve added basic keyboard navigation to Pandora. You can now control music playback from your keyboard:
spacebar: Toggle Play / Pause
right-arrow: Skip to the Next Song
plus: I Like this Song
minus: I Don’t Like this Song
up-arrow: Raise Volume
down-arrow: Lower Volume
shift + up-arrow: Full Volume
shift + down-arrow: Mute
There is one important caveat: thanks to the wonderful world of web browsers, the keyboard navigation only works if our player has “focus.” This means that you need to click the player once before the keyboard shortcuts work. If you click outside the player on the page, you’ll have to click back in the player again to use the keyboard equivalents. We’ll work on refining this (and adding more keyboard shortcuts) over time.

Comments

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  1. james.eberhardt
    August 26, 2006 at 5:19pm
    Technically the keyboard shortcuts do not interfere with the possibility of using the space bar while the browser window is in focus. Not only does the browser window need to have focus, but the Flash player needs to have the focus. The Flash player all by itself will interfere with the use of keyboard shortcuts for Virtue and Spotlight. Give it at test by going to another site that uses Flash and give the Flash player focus. Hope these comments help.
  2. caryn
    February 28, 2007 at 4:46am
    Hey!!!! this is sooooo great, i love it but the only problem is that i dont live in america and i do not have a USA zip code so i cant register.....(sigh)
  3. dan
    May 18, 2008 at 7:11pm
    You are totally on the right track. Now: musts: pageup: go up one station pagedn: go down one station wants: home: "why are you playing this song" end: close popup from above you guys rock!
  4. ben
    September 16, 2008 at 9:02pm
    hey guys i was just wondering how an artist would add his/her music to the Music Genome Project pandera rules but im still curious
  5. Petro
    April 01, 2009 at 12:27am
    If there was an option to dislike artists as a whole, instead of just song by song, that would be great. Also, It seems with the layout of most keyboards and by intuition, that Shift+? would be an appropriate shortcut for "why are you playing this song?".
  6. Nelis
    August 26, 2009 at 12:33pm
    @dan I agree that is a must have. Pageup/down for station up and down.
  7. Mike
    March 29, 2010 at 6:41am
    I would also like to see a way to DISABLE the keyboard shortcuts. It interferes with my ability to use "Snap" features in Windows 7. For example, if I want to move Firefox to the right side of the screen, I hit "Windows-key + Right-arrow". The Snap works, but it also makes Pandora skip to the next track. I also use a program that allows me to control volume across the entire system using kybd shortcuts. The shortcut sequence for volume up/down is "Ctrl + Up-arrow/Down-arrow". Guess what this makes Pandora do - approve or disapprove a currently playing song! Not good. Please please please give us a way to disable this feature. -Mike
  8. mattymatt
    April 26, 2010 at 1:59am
    Any chance you might add an option to disable keyboard shortcuts? I use keyboard shortcuts like Command-Right to switch tabs in Firefox, and I'm constantly accidentally skipping songs in Pandora because Firefox's tab-switching shortcut conflicts with Pandora's.

Comments are closed.