Pandoras Box Updated - Pandora API 2 Supported

Latest version of Pandoras Box supports the new Pandora Tuner and event API. Also additions include a Pandoralicious Station browser and a more efficient station tracker and chooser.

2006-10-13 11:59:00.0

Pandoras Box Updated - Pandora API 2 Supported

Sometime in the wee hours of this morning, Pandora released a new version of the player which added a number of new features.

One of these features was the new Pandora Events API Version 2. This broke the way Pandoras Box retrieved the current song and artist. This is now resolved.

Also the Station Quick Mix is now supported.

I also took this release to add Pandoralicious Station Browsing facilities.

You also have the option of logging all songs you like to a text file to explore later.

There is one more nice fature in there but I'll post on this later.

If you are upgrading to a the latest version, I would recommend un-installing the last version completely before installing this version. If your lazy and you dont un-install you probably wont have any issues :-)

Thanks to all who donated to the PayPal beer fund. Very much appreciated! I you havent done so yet and you appreciate the application there is no time like the present ;-)

DOWNLOAD LATEST VERSION - V1.3.3

You can find out all about Pandoras Box and read about the initial version here :

Pandoras Box - System Tray Wrapper Application For Pandora

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 Pandoras Box, please consider clicking the donate button :-)

posted by Daniel Mackey @ 11:59AM - Friday 13 October 2006  

Tags: Pandoras Box | Windows Dev
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Comments [33] - Leave a comment

Comments

willian said:
Hey very Good =]
Thanks Dan
But i am having a problem when i start Pandora's Box, it Appear:
"Component 'MSINET.OCX' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid"

What's it??
Dan said:
Hi Willian,

Sorry about that. If you download the package again this file is included and should get registered for you. Let me know by email if it solves your problem.

This file is used for the advanced feature to post the current song and artist to an arbituary url so you can have a Whats Playing on your blog etc. Check the right of my blog for an example of what I am listening to currently using Pandoras Box.

Dan.
Kevin said:
i found out how to post to blog or something, can i ruin for everybody else? pleeease?
na, im just messing. nice feature, does it just take the url and tack the current playing trackname and artist on the end, or is there a magic string to put in the url?
Kevin said:
my bad, i forgot, where does it log the songs?
Dan said:
Hi Kevin, ha ha I was so busy getting it compatible with the new Pandora tuner and API that I didnt get to finish the settings dialog.

In the ini file you can specify a URL that the artist and track gets posted to using a normal Form Encoded HTTP post. The receivable variables are : SONG and ARTIST. When the app is closing, it makes a post with one variable called NOTPLAYING with a value of YES.

The songs you voted as like are stored in a text file in the c:program filespandoras box folder called SONGSILIKE.TXT.

For the song posting/displaying on a blog, I suggest you have your receiving file write it to a text file on your server and then have a file that reads this when displaying your page. This is the most efficient way of doing it. I am going ajaxify mine so it is in realtime once I drink enough beer, get the thumb out and add more features to Pandoras Box. :-)

Dan.
Kevin said:
thanks dan
now if only there was a way to get that data onto google pages...
willian said:
Humm ok Dan, Thanks =]
So how can i run the Version 1.3.3 without this file?
Because just the Version 1.3.0 is running, but without some options, like: "Popup notifications on song/artist change, Now posts to Windows Messenger to show the currently playing song"
i think so it's because the new Pandora Player, Right?!
so how can i fix it?

Thanks for ur Atention Dan =)
Oded said:
Hi Dan,thanks for making Pandora's box. I've encountered a crash with the latest version though (ver. 1.33). I get a "Run time error 91. Object variable or with block variable not set". I've unintsalled the last version before I installed the new one. Any idea what's the problem? Thanks.
willian said:
Dan Thanks so Much,
It's runnig ok now :D

Thanks for your Help and Attention =]
Roger said:
Pandora's Box wasn't working for me today, so I looked on your site and downloaded V1.3.3. Still no luck! (Though PB shows changes etc. if I play Pandora in a normal browser.
Jeff Bailey said:
It would be great if the source was available for this. Right now I get the infamous VB "Object variable or with block variable not set". I'm sure I could fix that in short order.
Sivan said:
I'm also getting the runtime error. Is there a work around for this?
Dan said:
Hi Sivian,

Can you tell me more information on the error? When do you get it and is it consitant? I cant recreate the problem here. Also, what version you running? Email me at dan@cfdan.com if you want.
Machiventa said:
i'm also getting "Run time error 91. Object variable or with block variable not set" as of 10/21/06
Machiventa said:
well now it seems to be working fine, weird. oh well, cheers dan! working great so far.
Machiventa said:
is there a way to submit tracks to my last.fm account?
Machiventa said:
sorry to ask another question but how do i turn off the clicking sound when it changes songs? i can't seem to figure it out.
Alex B said:
Great program! This makes Pandora, which is amazing itself, that much better. If I don't have to open a browser window and it's more like opening an application, I use it much more.

To another comenter: there is a way to tranfer songs to your LastFM account. Just google it or find it on I believe LifeHacker.com .

Thanks, Dan!
stuk said:
hmm what about to do that the album pic will be shown in the msn pic? =]
Ola said:
First. Thanks for a great program. However I too have encountered this error in 1.3.7. It installs fine but then when it loads all stations, I get: "Run-time error '91' Object variable or With block not set.
The player start to play but crash imediatelly when I try to use the tray icon.
Is it possible to leave an old version for now?
I use Windows 2000 5.00.2195 Service pack 4. IE 6.0.2800.1106. I know, I know it's old but our IT-strategy is change to XP when Vista is launched.
Kevin said:
hmmm, i see open-source has made a big impact, maybe you will too? [cough] open source it [cough]
seriously, the app would make more progress having many people working on it and more features being churned out than just you alone.
think about it
Kevin said:
Ola, i use the same at school and pandoras box works fine there, even if pandora itself doesnt. by that i mean the school caps each workstations download speedat around 20k/s. it makes sense from an admin's point of view, but from a users it pisses you off to no end. hence, no pandora. but pandoras box _does_ work, somaybe its something else.
Dan said:
Hi all, after some time I have managed to create the problem some people are having. To resolve this issue, I had to:

1) Disable AVG Antispyware
2) Install flash 9 in Internet Explorer.

Restart Pandoras Box and enjoy the music!

I will be developing a dedicated site for Pandoras Box and moving it off my blog in the near future. This will have a detailed FAQ and I will start moving to an open-source version of Pandoras Box.

Dan.
Per Wiklander said:
First: Thanks for a really great application! Pandora was great before but this made it so much better :-)

And now a a few feature requests:
I'm using 1.3.8, which I hope is the latest version. I'm using the "I'm tired of this song - don't play it for a month" feature of Pandora a lot. It would be nice to have that in the menu. An other thing that would be good is to control Pandora's Box with my keyboard. I found the "Enable Media Keys" setting, but I don't really know what it does. One solution would be to let the .exe take all useful commands as command line arguments and apply those to the currently running Pandora's Box. Then I could bind "pandorasBox.exe --pause" to whatever key I want or put it into a shortcut or whatever.
Kevin said:
Alas, Pandora's Box no longer works, at least behind my company's firewall. Whenever I try PB I get the error:

"We're having unexpected technical difficulties. Our engineers are scrambling to fix things. Please try again later."

However when I got to the Pandora.com site with IE7 everything works fine.
Daniel said:
Hi Kevin, must of been a temp problem as I havent noticed it not working. Working fine right now...
pawnup said:
Hi, great project, great collection!

The pandora.com page asks me to install a Skype activex control, which in turn tries to open my skype page. Is there a spyware issue here?
myguess said:
Great app. Thanks.

Selecting "I Like This Song" on a song which has played previously, but which is not currently playing, results in the currently playing song being logged to the "songsILike.txt", instead of the song that I actually like from earlier in my listening session.

I thought you'd want to know.
Johnny Wong said:
I have the same problem as pawnup -- i also get a message saying that a web page from www.pandora.com is trying to access my skype account services.

is this a malware / spyware?
Dan said:
Hi Johnny,

The Skype integration with Pandora is annoying but is not malicious in any way. Pandora have added the Skype functionality (financial arrangement??) so in Mozilla, Internet Explorer (hence Pandoras Box) you will get this plugin request. I am going to look at a way of stripping it out and will let you know how I get on...
Grant said:
Pandora's Box is exactly what I was looking for - even better in fact.

One problem tho'. It doesn't know what song is playing, as it continually reports one song/artist, even as the songs in Pandora change. Have you heard of this before? (I'm running IE6 in Windows 2000 if that is a factor.)
pierre said:
Hi Dan.

Congratulations on a wonderful program!

However I would like to suggest adding some features to it, if you don't mind :D

I saw a request for updating last.fm account with songs played (and of course wheather they were liked or not) - thumbs up for this idea.

The "I hate this song..." was also mentioned - although I don't use this feature very often I also agree with this.

And last, but not least something not mentioned before: I think you should add to the song change notification ballon an option to vote for the _previous_ track... It's quite strange how nobody thought about this, but it's the essence of Pandora: I get to her track I've never heard before, but when it begins I have no idea whether I like it or not... And yes, I know about the right click menu but it's more obvious in the bubble, which catches your attention anyway.

One more thing: I can't imagine how hard would it be to connect it to WinAMP somehow - at least to use it's keyboard shorcuts (I'm missing "pause" very much and my laptop doesn't have any media keys, arrrgh). Or at least please meke the tray icon play/pause for left click and maybe put the main window in the right click context menu.

Thank you very much for your time.

Yours

Peter
Eliah Hecht said:
I'm not sure how dead this thread is, but I figured out how to disable IE's clicking sound that happens when OpenPandora switches songs (copied from another site):

Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Sounds and Audio devices

Click the 'sounds' tab. In the window, scroll down to 'Windows Explorer' and in the sub menu, highlight 'Start navigation'

Pull down the drop down box below, where it currently says 'Start' or 'Windows Start' and choose '(none)' instead. Click 'Apply', then click OK, and close the Control Panel.