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Making the most of Pandora.com

Pandora.com is pretty cool, it’s been around for a while now but I just went back to it for some easy listening background music to work to.

Supposedly they’ve begun to use IP filtering to limit the audience to the US. Either this is no longer in place or they’ve made a mistake in a regex somewhere, as this is definitely not the US.

I’d forgotten about the limit to the unpaid service, which stops playback after so many songs, but it was quite a while before I actually encountered it.
This may be a Mac OS X bug in the flash implementation, but it seems that if you keep the Firefox window containing the player minimised in the Dock, the music doesn’t stop playing!
Of course this does get in the way of the whole feedback system slightly, but I’m sure there are those who won’t mind too much.

Once I did encounter the limit I couldn’t just refresh the page and go back to listening again as they’re smart enough to stop you doing that.

But not that smart.

To completely stop this you would require either some heinous DRM-spawn system describable as cookies which you can’t delete, or some kind of unique client ID, effectively voiding all browser privacy. So to be fair, from the technologies they had to work with, they’ve done the best they could. ;)

So once you’ve been shut out of the Pandora player try the following:

1. Delete your cookies from their domains.
2. Delete any data stored within Adobe Flash for their domain.

The latter can be achieved by opening the Adobe Flash client settings and changing the data limit for the domain to 0KB, which will take effect upon refreshing the page, upon which the flash applet will request to store data in your browser again, and you’re back listening, but without any of your stations.

Update:

It appears that the region filtering will go live on January 15th, not quite yet.