06.11
Without further ado, Elpis is back! Download Here!
It’s be a long couple of weeks for me, as I know it has for many of you that are used to using Elpis every day. I not only rewrote a vast majority of the code that communicates with Pandora but snuck in a number of bug fixes and new features along the way (see previous posts).
Here’s a brief rundown of the new stuff:
- Elpis specific Volume control. (New volume button on the main control bar)
- Track rating from the tray icon context menu
- Purchasing songs/albums from Amazon. Go to Song menu (Right arrow between thumbs) > Purchase
- Basic proxy support. See this post for details.
One thing, however, has been removed… Force SSL. In the past this would fix some connection issues but with the JSON API all it does now is break everything. Therefore, it has been removed from the options and the config file. If you used Force SSL in a previous version, it will revert to the normal method after upgrading. For those of you outside the USA for which this was an easy fix to get things working, I’m really sorry but it will not likely be coming back. To get back up and running again, please visit the post about proxies listed above.
Other than that, everything should work exactly as it did before, if not even a little better. I really hope that everyone enjoys this new version. Please let anyone you know that uses Elpis know about the update. I hope not to have lost too many users because it took longer to get things working again, so please let them know that all they have to do is download and install from here or simple run the old version of Elpis again and be prompted for the new version.
Last, but surely not least, thank you everyone for all of your amazing support!
Freaking love you man. Thanks so much for all your work.
Seriously….Great Job…Thank You So Much….Love this little app….
is elpis down right now? cant logg in
Working fine from my end.
Inaccessible to us blind users running screen readers.
There is an accessible Pandora client developed by a blind person at http://q-continuum.net/hope/, but it’s lacking in features when compared to Elpis. No ability to minimize to the system tray or set hotkeys, for example, audio quality is low and can’t be upped if you’ve got Pandora 1 (something I’d love), and the connection keeps dropping after a couple hours of listening, meaning you have to restart the stations / app (something else kind of important).
It is a useable Pandora client, though, it just goes down and needs updating when the Pandora API changes. At the time of this writing it’s been working for a couple weeks. If anyone else wants to try it, I’m not sure how this looks to sighted people, but feel free to. It’s a paid product, though, one thing that sets it down from open source clients like Elpis.
Anyway, just thought I’d ask you if it weren’t too hard to edit your interface a little to work better for us blind Pandora users. If not, that’s okay. I’m sure your client’ll go far with sighties, the way it is now.
I’d love to be able to support absolutely everyone that I can. But I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t even know where to start when it comes to making Elpis work with screen readers.
I’ll look into what might be done, but cannot make any promises.
Hello again,
I did find at least something, if you need it. From the Microsoft website. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb735024.aspx
I’ve also written to the other app’s developer and asked him to build those few missing features into his app.
Thanks, and good luck if you decide to go through with this.
Thanks! I’ll definitely take a look.
I’ve also been toying with creating a an RPC interfacet to Elpis that would allow control from another application, web browser, etc.
From what I saw of Hope, it’s UI is very simplistic, which I guess makes sense as it would be easier for screen readers. As strange as it might sound, assuming I create that RPC interface, it would actually be easier to write a really simple interface (web based maybe?) that controls Elpis. I will see what I can do
As for the developer of Hope, I have some concerns there. I downloaded it and I have a strong suspicion that they ripped off a lot of code from Pithos, the linux Pandora app. A lot of the structure and the fact that it’s all in Python is very suspect to me. That wouldn’t be so bad if it was open source or at least free. There’s a huge reason that Elpis is licensed GPL and that is because Pithos is GPL and my original API is just a port of the Pithos Python code to C#.
Sorry, I rant…
I’m so glad you fixed Elpis. Even without the “forced SSL” it is great, i just have to use the proxy method, edit the config, and all is fine
Thank you so much!
Hey Adam, thank you so much for your amazing Elpis. I love it to death! Just one question: If I delete a station, and then re-add it, it seems like all my likes are still there, since songs that I have previously liked still have the “thumbs up”. What if I want to start a station from scratch? Or does it only seem that way, and in reality the thumbs-up are just in some kind of cache, not affecting the actual radio station in Pandora? Cheers and thanks again!
Observant, you are. Sadly, this is something to do with Pandora’s back-end system and nothing I can really do. The reason is that when you delete a station, they never really delete it. On their end it’s stored with an identifier that is based on the user ID and the seed (track, album, artist) ID. Since, when you re-add the station it has the same exact IDs, all they really do is resurrect the deleted station. You may notice that when stations are sorted by age and you re-add a station that was created long ago, it still shows up WAY down in the list. This is why. It is the same exact station.
I believe that part of the reason they don’t actually delete it is that, for example, you could share a station with me that I would then add to my account. Well, I wouldn’t want it to disappear from mine just because you deleted it.
So, there’s only one way to really reset a station aside from creating a new account or creating a new station based off of something similar but not exact…
In Elpis, go to the Station List and click on the menu button (right arrow) for the station in question. Select “Station Info”. This will load the web page for the station (you will probably have to log in). On that page, you will see all of the station seeds and thumbs up/down associated with it. Delete where appropriate back to no ratings and just the original station seed. Now your station will be reset to original.
Maybe in the future I will add a “Station Reset” option that automates this for you
Hope that helps!
BTW… you didn’t provide a real email address so the only way you will see this is if you check back. If you leave a real one, however, the system will email you when I respond to a comment. But it will not be publicly visible to anyone.
Thank you for that insightful response. I just did like you said and it worked. Thank you!
Elpis is awesome!
It seems that there are 42 and 30 second blips of silence that appear after a few songs. Ads? But it wont let one continue on to a song afterwards.
Can you send me a log via the issue tracker?
http://code.google.com/p/elpis-pandora-client/issues/list
Hi, Let me thank you for the wonderful program. This is exactly what i was looking for. I appreciate the work you’ve done on this. The lightweight client works wonderfully