Another Internet classical music provider I've been told about is Pandora. Friends that have used it say it's good but my experience has not been so. Like all these so-called stations they use lots of JavaScript to make things work. Perhaps I'm handicapping myself by trying to protect myself, but I use FireFox with the NoScript add-on enabled. I also run under Linux and the KDE windowing system. It appears that the techies at Pandora must be MAC or Windows enthusiasts and never look at their stuff from a Linux-based browser. After telling Firefox/NoScript to allow Pandora's script, when I try to listen to something I get a funny smudge on my screen and nothing else. Certainly no music. So much for Pandora.
Many of these stations (and lots of other web sites) are using secondary web measuring tools like google-analytics, double-click and quantserv. I've got my browser configured to ignore these annoying and intrustive scripts. It's always seemed to me that sites that rely on these tracking tools are just lazy and unwilling to look at what their own servers generate in terms of logging. Why should the end user suffer additional network traffic after loading these pages which contains hidden links to other measuring sites. I'm old-fashioned I guess, but I don't approve of it.
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I need classical music. I used to get my daily dose from FM radio, but now I've shifted to either silence or the internet. The Denver classical station, KVOD, has gone over to the dark side and now broadcasts unannounced tracks and an occasional complete work, I suspect lawyers are the limiting factor, but I've given up and only listen in my car. Now it's Pandora and Last.fm and Spotify and a raft of others. Boulder has enormous musical opportunities, hence this blog.
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- ClassicalListener
- The picture is of my newest grandaughter, Gracin Cutforth, and me, "Shogun" or, as my young grandkids call me "Do-Do". I'm retired and enjoy working occasionally on internet applications coding in perl, playing volleyball, going to concerts, skiing, biking, participating in a discussion group, and occasionally cooking.
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3 comments:
Hi Art -
Finally got around to checking this out... The problem is not the MAC-ness of Pandora developers, it is the non-Mac/Linux of Adobe. Pandora is not using JavaScript to any great extent - they're using Flash. Even on my up-to-date CentOs box which I'm running in 64bit mode - there is not Flash plugin for Firefox 3.0.4. Now, if I went to 32 bit, it wouldn't be so bad.
So you need to find out which Flash Player plugin you're using - see if there's an update to Version 9 or otherwise download a standalone SWF file player which you could find with an ordinary Google search of "linux swf player"
HTH!
Thanks, Engineer Dude. That was a good pointer and there is an update for flash, 10.0.12.36, which installed fine on my system, but which yields that same results. Pandora seems to invoke an swf file through a javascript Pandora.launchStationFromId which, I'm guessing based on your comments, launches the flash player against the swf file. I still get the skinny smudge and no sound. I check against some other swf files I had and the player works, just not Pandora's invocation.
I appreciate the suggestion.
The Engineering Dude has struck paydirt. He just provided me with a good URL, https://www.pandora.com:443/radio/tuner_8_7_0_0_pandora.swf, which seems to allow me to play my Pandora stations. Great! Thanks a lot.
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