2012
04.26

First off, I sincerely apologize for Elpis not really working the last couple of days. It’s been a bit crazy, but basically Pandora won’t cut me a break and keeps changing things on me. Once again, I have it working again and I sincerely hope that it stays that way for some time.

Many thanks to everyone for all of the kind comments and support of Elpis, and for sticking with it when it keeps breaking!

Hit the project page to download the latest or just restart the client.

2012
04.25

New Version (0.9.5)

At some point last night, Pandora pushed out an update that broke the Elpis API. Fortunately, I was a very simple change and I have been able create a fix and push a new version out. Download from the project page or just launch Elpis again to get the update notification.

2012
03.07

Elpis v0.9.2

Just a quick update. I have updated Elpis to v0.9.2. Nothing new feature wise, just a little preemptive update to some changes by Pandora that may have caused problems in the near future.

On a side note: I have not forgotten about new feature requests, I’m just in the process of moving to another state for a new job. So, things are a bit crazy right now. As soon as things calm down a bit there should be some great new features coming.

2012
02.18

Impeccable timing

So, my sources tell me that Elpis may start having problems connecting to Pandora soon if it has not started already.

Good news is there is a fix available that should be easy enough to implement.

Bad news is that I am about on vacation and, starting tomorrow, will have no internet access until the end of the month. Not that I have my development gear with me anyways…

So, if you have an issue connecting….PLEASE don’t log a new issue. I’m aware of the problem and will have a fix as soon as I get back.

On a sort of related note; to prevent things like this in the future, if there are any devs out there that would be interested in helping out with the development of Elpis, shoot me a message at email at adamhaile dot net. As it is I am starting a new job and will be very busy moving an getting started with that the next few months, so I could use the help.

Will have a fix as soon as I get back…

2012
02.09

Elpis v0.9.1

As promised, I’ve fixed the problem that some were having with Elpis and getting locked out of the accounts. Head on over to the project page or just restart Elpis to grab the new version!

2012
02.06

Tempting Irony

It was not long ago that I called it game over for Elpis. I was fairly comfortable in doing this because, well, it didn’t really have all that many users. As of the writing of that article, there were around 400 downloads of the most recent version.

But the universe has an ironic sense of humor. Saturday night (Feb 4th), Lifehacker.com posted a review of Elpis and in the ensuing hours, the downloads exploded. As of now, I’ve had over 2000 installs in under 48 hours.

The twist to this is that Elpis does still basically work as long as you don’t skip. What I had not realized is that most people (i.e. not me) just start it up and let it run, never incurring the newly messed with skip limit.

So, I’m going to try to have a new version out in the next couple days that will get things going again, at least until it gets squashed again.

More soon…

2012
01.31

It was a good run…

First off, some history.

Back in July/August of 2011 when I first decided to take on the task of creating a Windows Pandora client, I contacted the developers of Pithos and pianobar to get their input on Pandora Inc’s stance on their unofficial clients. At the time, the message I got was that, while the clients were wholly unsupported, Pandora never directly opposed the clients. With the exception of the very occasional API change that would break something, everything was fine. So, I decided to go for it and got to work on my client.

As I made progress on the code for Elpis, I had no problems for months. But then, between early November and when I released Elpis, mid December, the API changed 3 times, breaking something a little worse each time. Each time it was relatively trivial to work around the issue and it generally seemed like infrastructure updates on their end. But then, a little over a week ago and about 1 month from when I first released Elpis, came very significant change. Suddenly, regardless of being a Pandora One subscriber or not, you would be locked out of your account via Elpis after often only playing a few songs. Messages from the server said that a skip limit had been reached.

For several days, no one really knew what changed, other than the server now looking for some cryptic value when logging in. Apparently, without this value you would keep hitting this skip limit. Well, now we know what this value is. I’ll save the technical details for a great post written by the author of pianobar, but the gist of it is that, this time, they were directly targeting unofficial clients like Elpis, Pithos and pianobar. Not only that, but it was made exceptionally hard to fix this time.

There have been a few workarounds suggested by the other developers, all of which could definitely get things running again. But, honestly, it would only be a matter of time until they upped the ante and clients stopped working again.

I wrote Elpis because I am a huge fan of Pandora and sincerely wish there was a way we could work with them to allow clients like these to exist or at least get the added features in their official client. But I’m also not about to push forward when there is such obvious opposition. It was fun while it lasted and I learned a great deal in the process but, effective immediately, I am discontinuing work on Elpis.

Technically, in some instances, as long as you never change stations or skip a song, Elpis will still work, but I will no longer provide updates to the code or any fixes if the API breaks further. The download links to v0.9.0.0 will remain online for the time being, but I will put a message on the project page that Elpis is now defunct. I do not do this without hesitation. This was my first ever public, open source project and I take a great deal of pride in it. I sincerely appreciate all of the support I’ve been given so far.

Elpis will not totally die, however. To be honest, the actual Pandora piece of Elpis is only a very small part of the whole. I designed it from the beginning to be very modular. I’ve got some ideas for some other things I could do with the rest of the code and interface and will actually be looking into refitting the interface and audio handling code to work with either another streaming service or maybe even local files. Life is become very busy at the moment, so it may be some time until this happens, but I will surely be doing something new before long.

So, thanks again for all the fun and stay tuned…

2012
01.19

Can’t catch a break

If you are an Elpis user and a Pandora One subscriber, good for you! And you can disregard this post.

It looks like Pandora has made a change in the last couple of days that unfortunately changes the way it handles the song skip limits. It used to be that they didn’t enforce the limits server side but now they are, which is causing problems in Elpis for some (free account) users since I never had to handle that case. The good news is that, so far, Elpis works fine as long as you don’t skip too many songs (which currently seems to be around 6-8 per day… I know, kinda low).

The bad news is that it’s very possible that Elpis will have to have a skip limit for free users moving forward, but who knows, maybe not.

The developers of the clients for other platforms (Pithos, Saver2, pianobar) are currently working on figuring out a fix and I will hopefully have a new release in the next few days.

Stay tuned…

2012
01.10

Elpis v0.9.0

As promised earlier today, there’s a new version of Elpis. Aside from just fixing that annoying little bug that cropped up, I’ve added a few new features.

  • QuickMix editing (QuickMix station Menu* > Edit QuickMix)
  • Create Station from playing Song/Artist in Song Menu
  • “Add Variety” in Station Menu
    • Makes the station based off more than just one artist, song or composer.

If you already have Elpis installed, just run it and you will be prompted for the new version download. Otherwise, visit the project page to download the latest version.

*BTW, the menus are the left-arrows on each item. Just click and the menu will show.

2012
01.10

About an hour ago it seems that Pandora changed something on their servers that broke my implementation of their API*. Fortunately, it looks like an easy fix and I should have a new version available later tonight… with new features even! I’ve been holding off on them, but it’s easier to release them than apply the changes to old code. Lucky you.

*For the geeky among you, they used to allow SSL (HTTPS) for all API calls but now, apparently, they only allow it on the sync and authenticate calls.  I guess it makes sense, but I honestly liked using SSL for everything.  I should just need to rewrite it to use SSL for sync and auth, but nothing else.