I recently got around to trying a great combination of software, that essentially allows me to listen to Pandora from my terminal. This is great for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it helps with the no-Flash diet I entered a few months ago. Since then, my computer has been running a lot faster, its battery has been lasting longer, and can actually satiate my thirst for hundreds of browser windows open at the same time (I know it's bad, I'm working on it). Second reason is that it is adding some more variety to my musical education. Listening to the top tracks on Spotify was seriously damaging my musical sensibility.

So what's this wonderful thing I'm talking about, I hear you say? Well, it's two awesome pieces of software. The first is Visor ( http://visor.binaryage.com/ ) which gives you a system-wide terminal from a hotkey. Need I explain why having a terminal on every space of your OS X desktop is awesome? Good. The second is Pianobar, ( https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar ), which actually lets you play Pandora from any terminal, not just OS X. The easiest way to install the latter on OS X is using Homebrew. Homebrew is a package manager for OS X which is rising in popularity. You can get it here: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/. You should install these software packages in the reverse order - just saying.

Since I've started using this system I've been enjoying my music a lot more. The reason for this is that it is getting better a lot faster than normal Pandora allows. Upvoting a song is just a CTRL+` and + away, without leaving whatever I was doing.

Hopefully this will be useful to you. Pianobar might be tricky to install since it has a number of dependencies. Let me know in the comments if you have trouble with any of them.