Welcome to Hope, an accessible interface to the Pandora Radio service. With Hope, finding new music and listening to old favorites is easier than ever. In this ReadMe you'll learn how to use the Hope application to create and listen to personalized internet radio. Pandora is an online service that enables you to create and customize your own internet radio stations. Through the feedback you provide, panndora gradually fine-tunes your custom station to meet your specific tastes. Unfortunately, the Pandora service is completely inaccessible, not allowing visually impaired users to sign up or listen to content. Hope enables you to use the Pandora service through an accessible intuetive desktop interface.
When you first start Hope you will be prompted to activate the program. If you have already purchased Hope the activation key should have already been e-mailed to you. If it was not you may re-request it from The Hope website. If you haven't yet purchased the application you can click the Demo button to run the application as a demonstration. As a demo, Hope will only let you manipulate a single Pandora station at a time. Please consider purchasing to unlock Hope's full functionality!
When you run the program for the first time, you will be prompted for your pandora username and password. If you already have an account with pandora, enter those details here. If not, you can press the register button to easily create one from within the program. Just provide your email address, pick a password, and answer the other questions. You will be up and running in no time. If you need to use a proxy server to access pandora, press the options button in the login dialog to enter the proxy address in host:port format.
Once you have signed in, you will be in your station list. If this is your first time using Pandora, the list will be empty. At this point, you can select the search button or press alt+s. In the Pandora search dialog, you may enter the name of an artist, song or genre of music and press enter. After a moment, you will be placed in a list of results that match your search term. Select the result that you want to use and press the create station button or alt+c. Pandora will create a station with music that is similar to your selection. Note that Pandora allows you to create 100 stations, so you should have plenty to listen to.
From the station list, you can begin playing a station, change it's name or delete the station. Each of these buttons has an accelerator key to make accessing the controls as quick as possible.
From your station list, select any station and press the listen button or alt+l to begin listening. At this point, the music will play and you will be in the now playing dialog. This window contains the information on the currently playing song, a set of playback controls and pandora's important feedback options. All controls have accompanying accelerator keys to make access to Hope's functions easy and intuitive.
The first four items in the now playing window display the artist, song title, album and genre of the song you are currently listening to. You will also find a button to buy the currently playing song. You can choose to buy the song from either the amazon mp3 store or the iTunes music store.
The playback controls are standard for any media player: play/pause, previous, next, and a volume control. There is also a position slider for navigating efficiently through the currently-playing song.
The feedback controls are explained in the next section, as they are an important influence on how your station develops.
You can see how your previous ratings have effected your station, which also provides an easy way to learn about how the Pandora system works. The now playing window contains a box with Pandora's explanation for why the current song was selected for this station. It lists several musical attributes of the song that make it similar to other songs that you left positive feedback about. This demonstrates the importance of feedback, since until you rate a few songs, all that Pandora has for reference is the artist or song you used to start the station off.
Hope uses the play/pause, as well as the next and previous track multimedia controls, so if you have these buttons on your keyboard it is easy to control the application when it does not have focus. You may disable this behavior in the options dialog.
Hope will announce the track as it begins playing. This functionality may likewise be disabled in the useful options dialog.
As you listen to your stations, you can provide feedback on which songs you like and dislike. These song ratings are used by Pandora to further customize the station as it learns about the kind of music you prefer to have on a given station. From the now playing window, press the thumbs up button or alt+u to indicate that you really like hearing the current song on this station. This increases the possibility of hearing this song and others that Pandora considers to be similar to it. Pressing the thumbs down button or alt+d indicates that a song really isn't right for you or for the sound that you are working for on this station. The song will be skipped, and Pandora will note the fact that you don't particularly like that sound right now. If you give thumbs down to two songs by the same artist on the same station, that artist will be banned from the station entirely. If you later change your mind about a piece of feedback you provided to the station, click the Edit Feedback button (alt+f) in this dialog. A list of previously-provided feedback will appear, and you can use the delete feedback button (alt+d) for instance if you decide you rather wouldn't have hit thumbs down on the last song. When you are done editing feedback, click the close button to be brought back into the current station's now playing window. If you are simply tired of hearing the currently-playing song, hit the I'm tired of this song! button, alt+I.
Pandora automatically creates a station which can be used to listen to a mix of your other stations. To edit which stations are included in your Quickmix, click the "Edit Quickmix" button or press alt+Q from the main window. The Quickmix editor dialog will appear. Each station is represented by a checkbox, check the box if you wish the station to be part of your quickmix or uncheck it if you'd rather remove it. Click finish to finish your work, or hit escape or click cancel to cancel.
Your purchase of Hope entitles you to free updates as the software improves. If you experience any bugs with your copy of Hope, send a detailed email including the problem you are experiencing, your Hope version, and information about your computer such as operating system version to q (at) qwitter-client.net.