Pandora / Spotify on the Pi

Note that to get Pandora (the most common Internet 'radio') you must have an American IP address. Proxies are reported to work just fine, however don't forget that for BBC iPlayer you must have a UK IP address :-) So here in UK, Spotify is a reasonable alternative.

However the 'free' versions of both Pandora and Spotify will feed you annoying adverts, and (of course) in the UK, to escape the adverts, you have to pay more than in USA

There is, of course, a whole 'sub-culture' dedicated to blocking adverts on the Internet, and that includes avoiding the adverts on the 'free' Pandora / Spotify feeds.

For those who are interested, the 'secret' to avoiding all those annoying adverts is how Internet radio 'streaming' is delivered to your PC. Music tracks are not sent as a single audio stream. Instead, each separate track is fetched by the player software on your PC 'one after the other'. Adverts are thus just 'another track' that your player 'fetches' - and since the adverts are held on a different 'server' to the music, even a simple browser 'ad blocker' can prevent them being 'fetched'. Pandora / Spotify are now clever enough to 'spot' a simple ad blocker, however dedicated 'blockers' are clever enough to 'spot' the ad. and allow it to play whilst muting the PC speakers (or you can try blocking the 'advert control path', tcp port 80/443 outbound, on your PC's firewall, for application spotify.exe) ... and so the 'battle' goes on.

Of course the 'battle' between adverts and ad-blockers can never be 'won' by the advertisers. The fact is, the 'wanted' content has to be 'played' to the user at some point. Modern PC's can do real-time frequency analysis on the audio stream, so if all else fails the same approach as used by 'spam blockers' could be adopted (i.e. generate a 'black list' of 'advert frequency analysis signatures'), however even if it does become 'impossible' to 'spot' the adverts 'programmatically', there's nothing to stop you recording the audio and 'time shifting' the playback. Even if the 'recorders' can be 'fooled' into recoding the adverts (current ones aren't fooled and dont' record the ads) the listener could still manually 'fast forward' over the adverts during playback (in the same way as old VHS video tape machines were used to skip TV adverts).

Todays 'blockers' are actually 'muters' (i.e. they don't skip the ads, only mute the PC speakers). So if you really want to skip the ads, you really do have to 'time-shift'. However this can be done quite simply using any one of the current 'Spotify Recorder' apps.

The simple method requires two machines - one has no speakers and is just left running Spotify and the 'recorder' app. (which places the recorded tracks into a 'shared' folder). The second machine (which could be your Raspberry Pi) 'watches' the shared folder contents and plays back each new track as it appears