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
    1# I am on archlinux..
2sudo pacman -S proxychains-ng
  2. Copy the configuration to the $HOME directory
    1cp /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.

1tail $HOME/proxychains.conf

1#
2#       proxy types: http, socks4, socks5
3#        ( auth types supported: "basic"-http  "user/pass"-socks )
4#
5[ProxyList]
6# add proxy here ...
7# meanwile
8# defaults set to "tor"
9# 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. Any online DNS resolver will also do the trick, like this one.

Pandora

I use the excellent pianobar frontend.

  1. Get pianobar
    1sudo pacman -S pianobar
  2. Use it with proxychains
    1proxychains pianobar
  3. Profit

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

1mkdir -p ~/.config/pianobar
2vim ~/.config/pianobar/config

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

1audio_quality = {high, medium, low}
2autostart_station = $ID
3password = "$PASS"
4user = "$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.