So I talk enough about
Pandora, the free web-based music recommendation engine and player that I seriously love. But I missed the boat when I didn't try out
OpenPandora sooner. OpenPandora is a free third-party Windows app that, in a nutshell, turns the ordinarily browser-bound Pandora into something more like a full-fledged desktop media player. Okay, so not exactly full-fledged--you're still limited to the songs the Pandora server feeds you--but OpenPandora adds a ton of features that make Pandora that much more enjoyable to use. First and foremost, it wraps the player up in a window that can be minimized to the tray, which is a
trick we've seen before, but a great trick nevertheless. But it gets way more interesting than that. OpenPandora also has a "Mini Player" mode that condenses the player to the basic controls (unfortunately thumbs-up and thumbs-down aren't among them) to get it out of your way. You can also control all of its functions by right-clicking on its title bar or tray icon. It has a function for copying the current artist and song title to the clipboard, and to run a lyrics search in your browser. It's has integration with Windows Live Messenger and Xfire, as well as Last.fm. You can control it with a standard multimedia keyboard or enable global keyboard shortcuts (I'm hoping someone hooks it up to
FoxyTunes soon), and it has proxy support. OpenPandora is under active development and you can keep tabs on it at the
OpenPandora blog.
Tags: desktop, free, freeware, music, openpandora, pandora, windows
