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.

Note

The SOCKS5 proxy from Windscribe has been phased out but it is actually easier to do this via the proxy gateway and split tunneling.

For inclusive split tunneling, add the following (minimally):

1tuner.pandora.com
2audio-usc-mp1-t1-2-v4v6.pandora.com

At some point it might be nice to actually have this done via a WireGuard configuration to cut out the app in the middle..

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.