inside the mind of a linux admin

Pandora on Linux: pianobar

“pianobar” is a free/open-source, console-based replacement for pandora’s flash player. “pianobarfly” is a patched version of it, which adds some pretty awesome features including capturing music from your stream into a local .mp3 file format.

Features

– play and manage (create, add more music, delete, rename, …) your stations
– rate played songs and let pandora explain why they have been selected
– show upcoming songs/song history
– configure keybindings
– last.fm scrobbling support (external application)
– proxy support for listeners outside the USA

Where to get it
Simply download it from git:
https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar.git

How to install
This gets to be slightly complicated depending on what flavour of Linux you are using. For ubuntu/debian users, I’ve made it extremely easy:

# sudo apt-get install libao-dev libao-common libfaad-dev libmad0-dev libtagc0-dev libjson0-dev libgnutls-dev

Then, you’ll need to retrieve the latest version from github:

This should leave you with a binary if all goes well. Copy it to somewhere in your $PATH (echo $PATH) and you can run it by simply typing pianobarfly. If not, you will need to get the appropriate libraries and packages for your particular system.

I do not offer support on this. Good luck!

Pianobar development page: http://6xq.net/html/00/17.html

Related Posts

synergy: How to enable crypto (encryption) and generate SSL certificate

The newer Linux versions of the popular mouse/keyboard sharing application “synergy” now has built in encryption. Here’s how to configure it: Just simply passing the –enable-crypto flag on your synergy server without having a proper SSL certificate will result in the inability to connect to clients and generate an error message similar to this in […]

Read More

Change Number Pad Delete (dot) key from a comma in Ubuntu Linux

I recently purchased a new keyboard and updated to the latest Ubuntu, I’m also an avid user of the number pad for quick input when dealing with spreadsheets or accounting. I found that my num pad’s delete key (“.”) was outputting a comma (“,”) instead. Pretty annoying? I agree, but this can be very easily […]

Read More

1 Comment

  • Darrell on Friday, May 13, 2011

    Good stuff! Thanks.

    Can you post the link where the patching info can be found? Seems like this program needs updated a lot.

    Also for those of you that would like mp3 (not m4a) files created, you will need to create a config file. See below.

    mkdir -p ~/.config/pianobar
    cat<~/.config/pianobar/config
    audio_format = mp3
    EOF

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.