Background

  • Pandora doesn’t work outside the states
  • I keep forgetting how to set-up proxychains

Proxychains

Technically this article expects proxychains-ng, which seems to be the more up-to-date fork of the original proxychains.

  1. Install proxychains-ng

    # I am on archlinux..
sudo pacman -S proxychains-ng

  2. Copy the configuration to the $HOME directory

    cp /etc/proxychains.conf .

  3. Edit said configuration to add some US-based proxy

In my particular case, I don’t keep the tor section enabled.

tail $HOME/proxychains.conf

#
#       proxy types: http, socks4, socks5
#        ( auth types supported: "basic"-http  "user/pass"-socks )
#
[ProxyList]
# add proxy here ...
# meanwile
# defaults set to "tor"
# socks4 	127.0.0.1 9050

I actually use Windscribe for my VPN needs, and they have a neat SOCKS5 proxy setup. This works out to a line like socks5 $IP $PORT $USERNAME $PASS being added. The default generator gives you a pretty server name, but to get the IP I use ping $SERVER and put that in the conf file.

Pandora

I use the excellent pianobar frontend.

  1. Get pianobar

    sudo pacman -S pianobar

  2. Use it with proxychains

    proxychains pianobar

  3. Profit

I also like setting up some defaults to make life easier:

mkdir -p ~/.config/pianobar
vim ~/.config/pianobar/config

I normally set the following (inspired by the ArchWiki):

audio_quality = {high, medium, low}
autostart_station = $ID
password = "$PASS"
user = "$emailID"

The autostart_station ID can be obtained by inspecting the terminal output during an initial run. I usually set it to the QuickMix station.