# Pianobar

Related articles

- List of Applications/Multimedia

Pianobar is a free/open-source, console-based client for the personalized online radio Pandora.

Features

- play and manage (create, add more music, delete, rename, ...) stations
- rate songs and explain why they have been selected
- upcoming songs/song history
- customize keybindings and text output
- remote control and eventcmd interface (send tracks to last.fm, for example)
- proxy support for listeners outside the USA

Tip: Since Pianobar is a command line interface based program it can be placed in a different vterm than your desktop and be left to run.

## Installation

Pianobar can be installed from the Official repositories with the package pianobar.

## Configuration

First, you need to create a configuration file for Pianobar. This should be located at `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pianobar/config` or `~/.config/pianobar/config`

    $ man pianobar

    CONFIGURATION
           The  configuration file consists of simple key = value lines, each ter‐
           minated with a newline (\n) character. Note that keys  and  values  are
           both  case  sensitive, and there must be exactly one space on each side
           of the equals sign.

           act_* keys control pianobar's key-bindings.  Every  one-byte  character
           except for \x00 and the special value disabled are allowed here.

Here is an example configuration file. See `man pianobar` for more configuration options.

    $ ~/.config/pianobar/config

    audio_quality = {high, medium, low}
    autostart_station = stationid

    password = plaintext_password
    user = your@user.name

## Troubleshooting

### Sound Quality Issues

If you are experiencing sound/quality issues when running pianobar, and you are currently using ALSA as your sound driver, the following fixes may be useful.

Warning: The provided fixes may affect other applications that use audio as the default driver is being changed.

1. Install alsa-oss. See the ALSA page for more information.
   - Change the default libao driver from alsa to oss.

   -     # /etc/libao.conf
         default_driver=oss

   - Now run pianobar

     -     $ aoss pianobar

2. Alternatively, you can use pulseaudio.

   -     # /etc/libao.conf
         default_driver=pulse

Note: Be sure to remove the dev=default option of the alsa driver or adjust it to specify a specific Pulse sink name or number.

### Network Error

If you are receiving the "Network error: TLS fingerprint mismatch" error when running pianobar the following fixes may be useful.

1. obtain the current tls_fingerprint by running the following command:

       # openssl s_client -connect tuner.pandora.com:443 < /dev/null 2> /dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint | tr -d ':' | cut -d'=' -f2

2. add this output to ~/.config/pianobar/config:

       ~/.config/pianobar/config

       audio_quality = high
       password = password
       user = email address
       tls_fingerprint = 13CC51AC0C31CD96C55015C76914360F7AC41A00

## See also

- Project's homepage
- Project's GitHub
- https://wiki.k2patel.in/pianobar

Category:

- Multimedia