Pandora Puts Streaming Music on the Desktop
Fans of the streaming music service Pandora have been clamoring for a desktop version of the service pretty much since Pandora launched. The company has finally delivered — Pandora has taken the wraps off its new desktop application.
While many were hoping for a Mozilla Prism-based app, Pandora opted to use Adobe’s AIR platform, which shouldn’t come has a huge surprise given that the web player was already Flash-based.
The new AIR-based Pandora desktop app is essentially just the Flash web app dumped into the AIR runtime. There’s some rather large ads, but otherwise it behaves just like the web-based Pandora.
The new AIR app has a couple of notable advantages over running Pandora in your browser. For one thing, there’s no more accidentally closing the Pandora tab or window and, even better, it cuts down on the amount of memory your browser uses.
Other nice features include a number of menu options available through the Dock menu (though, regrettably, not the thumbs up/thumbs down controls).
Although it’s a beta release for now, the app worked just fine in my testing. Personally I primarily use Pandora via my Squeezebox, so the AIR app is of limited usefulness, but if you’ve been looking to free Pandora from the browser the new AIR app is exactly what you’ve been wanting.
Of course there are some other ways to get Pandora out of the browser. You can create your own Prism-based Pandora app without too much trouble and for Mac users there’s always Pandora Boy.
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