Pandora's Box Update

Of all the features, updates and additions I added to Pandora's Box, the most frequent request from people was to add an apostrophe to the name :-) I have relented and added it to the latest version Version 1.3.8.

2006-10-31 12:45:00.0

Pandora's Box Update

Of all the features, updates and additions I added to Pandora's Box, the most frequent request from people was to add an apostrophe to the name :-) I have relented and added it to the latest version Version 1.3.8.

DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.3.8

Alot of people were also getting the infamous Runtime Error 91 message in Pandora's Box and for ages I couldnt recreate it. Tim from Pandora Stations helped me solve this and it boiled down to the station xml file. Apparently the fields in this XML file are not consistant and I wasnt catching this.

This is now fixed in the latest version of Pandora's Box.

The apostrophes is especially for Stephanie who also sent a very kind and substantial donation! Thanks Steph!

And a big Thank You to all people who donated so far to the Pandora's Box project. I have spent it on :

  • Beer - Had to be done :-)
  • A brilliant C# Book
  • Gordon Ramsays Kitchen Nightmares Revisited DVD set (which is brilliant!)
  • The Royal Family : Queen of Sheba DVD (I cried watching this....reminded my of my Nana)
  • The Godfathers Revenge Book (Mario Puzo) Next chapter of my favourite story!

I am also working on a dedicated site for Pandora's Box which will be up soon and moving it off my blog. The new site will also see Pandora's Box being opened up in some shape or form as an Open Source Project. I am thinking of developing it further in C# and have already got the basics running as a .NET 2.0 C# application.

Thank you to everyone who contributed comments, suggestions and encouragement. As always donated beer money goes along way to encourage development so if you like and use Pandora's Box, please consider clicking the donate button :-)

posted by Daniel Mackey @ 12:45PM - Tuesday 31 October 2006  

Tags: Pandoras Box
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Comments [47] - Leave a comment

Comments

Topper said:
Glad to see you added that apostrophe! But if I had known you were going to waste your money on The Royal Family DVD, I wouldn't have given you a penny!!

But then I didn't give you a penny so that's OK. (At least the beer part of the list makes up for your disfunction ;).)
Kevin said:
you broke lyrics, not that i use it much anyways. just thought id let you know
Dan said:
Hi Kevin, lyrics arent broken, not for me anyway. Nothing changed in the lyrics code. What you seeing? Dan.
Dan said:
Topps, I challenge anybody to try and watch that DVD without crying. It is by far the saddest and most touching TV programme I have watched in my 27 years!
John said:
Hi Dan, Great work on Pandoras Box. Main problem I have though is that when a song I like appears I have to open Pandoras Box to see if I've already said I like it. Could you add something to the song details speech bubble and to the taskbar menu to show it's already a song I like? Or even better change the task bar icon.
Dimitris said:
Why don't you include all the new features of Pandora's Box in your post? I am currently using a different wrapper and I am not willing to switch if I don't see at least first all the features listed somewhere.

I'll have to wait for your new site I guess.
Fowl said:
Great app btw, what platform is it written on now? VB?
Feature request:
Can you change the order to Song - Artist that you send to MSN, because in the current Artist - Song makes the links MSN generates to the music store not work. Thanks!
kamal said:
Feature request: support the "I'm tired of this song" rating that was newly introduced by Pandora.
Machiventa said:
lol@paypal beer money.

great work dan!
Jere said:
Hi Dan.
Nice program you made, esp. the msn thing is nice. However, I think theres a hefty memory leak! Whenever I hide the window or show it, or even just move the cursor over the taskbar-symbol, the RAM usage for pandorasBox.exe increases by 200KB. (At first: 50MB, after an hour this gets to about 90MB!) After one, two hours I always have to restart the program.

I dont know if you can fix this problem, but it would be great if you tried...
(btw, I havent installed anything besides flash and google toolbar in my IE6)

anyway, great program! greetings from switzerland!
Vafel said:
Im using this great program for quite a while now and recently I cannot get it to work, i got the newest version and yet when I open Pandora's Box it shows only "white" where Pandora should appear I'm quite sure its not a firewall or somthing of that kind, is it just happening to me?
Oh and reinstalling didn't help either.

Thanks again for a great program :)
Dan said:
Hi Vafel,

Thank you for your kind words! I would suggest closing Pandora's Box and opening Internet Explorer. Delete your temporary internet files (cache) and possibly check to see if you have the latest version of Flash.
Relaunch Pandora's Box and enjoy the music ;-)
demetrius pinder said:
This is awesome! Thanks!
willian said:
Dan, About Global Keys,
Should u add this function.. so we can change te music by the keyboard =]
Is it possible?

Thanks Dan.
wideawakewesley said:
Dan, have you noticed that MSN have cut a deal with Pandora. Pandora now provides the backbone for their radio service.
http://radio.msn.com/

Wes
Chris Ovenden said:
Hi Dan

I love Pandora's Box. I have one *tiny* gripe - when I click on one of the bookmark options inside Pandora itself, the link opens an IE window. Probably this is unavoidable, but I would prefer it if it opened in Firefox, which is my default browser, or if there was an option to suppress this (usually unwanted) window altogether.

Keep up the good work!

Chris
Alex said:
Hey Dan,

Thanks a lot for that great piece of work. It is a very nice and usefull program :D .

Do you know MediaPortal? This also is a really nice and widespread open source project of a media center application for PCs. They might be interested to have a plugin based on your work so you might want to check the project out @ www.team-mediaportal.com. Your program would fit perfectly :D .

Greez, Alex
Daniel Mackey said:
Wesley, Thats very interesting!! I may do a setting so you can pick your skin. If you go to the MSN one your Pandora stations load in and vice versa.

Alex, I like the idea of the Media Center thingy. I looked at the contribute page and saw you can develop plug-ins in C#. If anybody reading this is interested in doing this with me, email me.
Ingmar said:
Great program, thanx! Please allow the 'notify on song change' info pop up to be without sound...
efrat said:
It's great, thanks!!

by the way, I miss the option to see the song's time (how long is the song? how much time i've got left)

Efrat
Sagie said:
Hi,

Very nice and convenient app.

I love the media keys support, but there's a bug in this feature. The media keys are indeed controlling Pandora's box, but also causing Windows Media Player to launch in my PC.

I think there is some action that you've missed, the application should register itself somehow, to avoid launching other programs. The media keys work flawlessly in my PC with Winamp (WMP not launching), so this not a problem with my PC's configuration.


Thanks,
Sagie.
Alberto said:
This is one great software. I always wanted a quick way to get access to Pandora and this is as good as it gets. Thanks for all the time and effort guys.
Andreas said:
Great piece of software!
What I really miss since I switched from Winamp to Pandora at work is a global hotkey to stop the music if a customer calls in. As my boss would be suspicious if I wanted to order a keyboard with media keys, I'd really appreciate to be able to define my own hotkeys or at least default ones that are available on an ordinary keyboard.
ofir said:
hi,
i use your pandora box and it's great.
just wanted to say thank you so much for this application. really enjoying it and what it has to offer.

just one thing i think you can improve in the prog. if there could be possible to print the song's words on the small lyrics window - then it would be awesome .

and again, thank you for making my surfing time a much better time with my favorite music :)
good to see, that there is a chance to hear music without breaking any law :)

well done, and have the best luck in anywhere you go :)
theg said:
I have just installed your wrapper, and I love it. 2 possible modifications/improvements have occurred to me, though: 1. an option to buffer songs (for some reason pandora has been skipping lately, especially on the first track, and automatically pausing it for 10 seconds or so before the first song could help)
2. I know it has already been mentioned, but using the default web browser, rather than just internet explorer would be preferable.

thanks, thegink
Isaac said:
This program looks really great, although I can't try it as I use a Mac. Any plans on making a Mac version? What about Linux?
Ovidiu said:
Dan ... it's working great!!! Thanx
Dan said:
Hey Dan, I was just looking at the config file and noticed this "posttoURL" feature. Any instructions as to how this is used? Currently i'm trying to write an xchat plugin that displays the current song playing in pandora, so I was wondering if there was some way to simply get Pandora's box to output the current song to a text file or something.
Dan said:
Also, it seems that I am having the same issue as a previous poster. Pandora's box seems to take up 60 megs of memory at start and then slowly takes more until I am forced to quit.
Dan said:
Unfortunately, the memory leak is from the Pandora Flash object and from reading is inherited from the OpenLazlo framework which Pandora is utilising.
Dan said:
Hi Kamal, I would love to support that feature but its not open to me programatically.
Nicholas Hance said:
This works great!

However, I use my computer with an IR remote to control the music and I'd love to use it with this. Is there any way I can get the program to receive WinLIRC events? Or is there something I can run from the command line to adjust volume, play/pause and next tracks?

Thanks!
Nick
eric said:
fantastic application. wondering whether there's Google Talk music player support in, or in the works for Pandora's Box, and also whether the source is available - I'd love to poke around with it - just got into C# recently.
Mark said:
Recently, there have been songs that just wouldn't play. It would move to the song and then just... not play. If I move forward a song, then it goes fine for a while. Today, though, no song will play. I can move forward through songs, but none play. Any ideas?
dhbabey said:
I'm not sure if this is possible, but I'd also LOVE to see a global hotkey feature that would allow me to pause, skip, rate etc without having to switch to the browser pane.

thanks!
Ken said:
New to Pandora - your program is a great help - I was always closing the browser.

One problem - I am receiving the following "Internet Explorer Script Error" when I open the Lyrics Window: An error has occurred in the script on this page. Line 4, Char: 1, Error: Syntax error, Code: 0.
Mike said:
I love Pandoras Box. I came across it when I was Googling for something that'll allow me to listen to Pandora.com but also show what I'm listening to on it on Windows Live Messenger.

The only thing is that when I first run it and Pandora is loading, I get the message saying that my stations couldn't be loaded and that I need to check my username and stuff although it logs me in just fine.

Also, as a feature request, Pandoras Box needs Last.fm support. :-)
Jaysin said:
Nice program ya have here, i just stumbled onto it while actually trying to find alittle tutorial on a problem i was having actually creating my own program just like this for my own personal use..
Dan said:
@Jayson

Hi Jayson, thank you for your comment. If you need help or have any questions when doing a similar app let me know and I'll see what I can do to help. Dan.
Mat said:
Hey I was wondering if it was at all possible to add a device setting to the program, like so you could select a device you wanted to play the music from, for instance.

I use a pair os USB headset and a sound card i play music out of my soundcard and the rest of the sounds come out my headset, is it at all possible to add a playback device settings?
Dan said:
@Mat: Hi Mat, unfortunately, the music comes directly from Pandoras flash object and I have no way of directing the output. Dan.
Apu said:
Does it submit tracks to last.fm as Openpandora used to do?
Ryan said:
They only thing that I think that could make this better is having a portable USB version or Firefox addon. Thanks Daniel.
Emily said:
For some reason, I can't get the artist and song names to show up on msn messenger, it shows up as "-" I don't know if anyone else has this problem. Everything else works. What did I do wrong?
Angie said:
I have downloaded this serval times, thinking I was doing something wrong. I cant get the info to come up on msn messenger, is there a direct link I can just download for that? Please help!!!
LaJ said:
I seem to be having the same problem as Emily and Angie. I have not been able to get the artist and song names into Windows Live Messenger. Is the problem that I'm using Windows Live Messenger and not MSN messenger?
Dustin Scherer said:
I seem to be having a similar issue with the song data appearing in messenger. I can only get the "-" symbol if I get anything at all. Perhaps it is the sequence in which I am activating it?