Pandora Downloader

Few weeks back I posted about ways of saving songs from Pandora as MP3 for free. Just today, I read about another such tool- Pandora Downloader.

It is very similar to Pandora jar that we had discussed the last time, but is a little simpler to setup and and keeps a list of all the songs that you have played, so you can select any/all the songs heard in a session and save them.

The UI still needs a lot of work but the program as such is straight forward to use. Saves files to C:\Pandora and currently works only when you are hearing songs in IE.

As expected, pandora got on top and fixed the loophole even before I wrote about it :-(

Dont get disheartened, the new version is slated for a Feb first week release and use some other hack :-)

More links -

Lifehacker

Pandora: How to save songs as MP3's for free

One of the few music related websites that has been able to perform exceptionally well in all the DRM/RIAA crap is Pandora.

Disclaimer: We do not encourage music piracy. You should use these steps only to figure out if the song is actually worth buying. More appropriately, you should use this ONLY if you own the music you are getting off Pandora. Otherwise it is illegal and we are not responsible for your actions.

Essentially there are two ways of storing pandora songs on your local machine.

I. For the less tech savy
Pre-requisites - Firefox, Java, Windows

1. Create a account on pandora.com
2. Download and run pandora's jar. All the detailed instructions can be found on this forum.
3. Extract and install the files to a folder of your choice (C:\My downloads\pandora)
4. Run the pandora.jar file (stored in C:\My downloads\pandora)
5. Visit http://localhost/ in firefox and you will see the "pandora jar" version of pandora.
6. As you listen, songs will be saved in a directory called mp3 in your original installation directory (C:\My downloads\pandora\mp3).

Follow instructions at Hak.5 for more directions and problems.

II. For the more tech-savy
Pre-requisites - Windows (should be do-able in linux also), Flash8, WMP
1. Play a song at Pandora.com. Pause the song after a couple of seconds, and open your temp files (in the Run dialog, type %TEMP%).
2. Find the folders labeled “plugtmp-n”, “n” being a number. Open the last folder of the series. If there is no number or dash, just open the folder.
3. Every file except the tuner file is media file. Right click and play in Windows Media Player. To enjoy the music - Save the file as mp3 (with .mp3 as extension)
(Just read that this does not work with Flash9. You might wanna try downgrading to flash8 and then trying)

In the process of writing this blog - I discovered two more ways of downloading music from Pandora. 3 tunes and Pyrcast. Currently, both the sites are down :(

Author - Sharad

Related Sites -
hack5
Lifehacker
TonyStreet
SecuriTeam
Open source alternative to 3 tunes.