The Pandora Evolution

Pandora has a new offering - it's called Pandora One.

Pandora One player (desktop)

This is only available to subscribers (a whopping $36 per). What do you get? Higher audio quality, customizable skins for the web player, no advertisements, and a cool new desktop app.

There are 2 ways to listen to Pandora from your desktop. One is to use OpenPandora, which is an open source free download. The other is to download Pandora's desktop player. The advantage of these desktop players is that you can just put the icon in your Quick Launch tray and listen with one click.

I have recently switched to the new Pandora One player.

It's advatages are 1) smaller overall size, 2) bigger album art, 3) nice fade out when you nix a song, 4) a little alert that flashes in the corner of the screen when a new song starts, and 5) it does not prompt you with a "are you sure you want to exit" screen when you hit close or if you're trying to shut down by just hitting your power button.

It's drawbacks are 1) you can only see one album at a time, so if you want to go back and rate the song before last, you can't, 2) no support for Windows Messenger to show the song you're listening to.


Pandora One song alert


Open Pandora (desktop)



Pandora mini-player (web)



Pandora One full screen player - classic view (web)


Pandora One full screen player - night skin (web)