Music streaming services have fundamentally altered the way that people access music. Sales of CDs have been steadily falling year on year although they continue to remain a popular format for music purchases. Digital music sales have also been decreasing. These falls have come at the same time as a profound surge in popularity of music streaming services. Competition in this field is fierce, with music providers such as Spotify, Google Play Music All Access, Amazon Music, Rdio, and Pandora all offering a convenient way to access a huge library of music without having to store physical discs or wait for music to synchronise with devices.
Pandora Internet Radio is a music streaming automated music recommendation service. The service is only available to listeners in the USA, although clients with proxy support enables individuals in other countries to use the service. Pandora plays musical selections of a certain type based on a user’s artist, song, or genre selection. Listeners give positive or negative feedback for the selected songs, which helps the music algorithm choose future songs to play. The service customizes playlists to individual listeners by analysing components of the songs they like, then playing them tracks with similar qualities or characteristics. Pandora has lost market share to Spotify.
Listening to Pandora Radio using a web browser is not the best way to enjoy the service. Improve the experience by using a desktop client. The operators, Pandora Media, Inc, offer the Pandora Desktop App which lets listeners play music from the desktop without requiring a web browser. However, the desktop application is only available for Windows and Mac users who subscribe to Pandora One. Fortunately, there are some excellent Linux clients that allow you to enjoy the Pandora service without needing a web browser or subscription.
This article highlights versatile open source Linux GUI and console clients that let users effortlessly access the Pandora service. Good quality open source software in this field is very sparse, fortunately there are still a few real gems.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled the following list of software. Hopefully there will be something of interest for anyone who wants to change the way they listen to music. Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart.
Click the links in the table below to explore each radio client.
| Pandora Radio Clients | |
|---|---|
| Pithos | Client with desktop integration and lightweight in system resources |
| pianobar | Console based client |
| pianod | Multi-source, network-controlled music player daemon |
| Panharmonicon | Command-line Pandora client written in Rust |
This article has been updated to reflect the changes outlined in our recent announcement.
 Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.