pianobar(1) General Commands Manual pianobar(1)

pianobar - console pandora.com music player

pianobar

pianobar is a lightweight console music player for the personalized online radio pandora.com.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pianobar/config or ~/.config/pianobar/config

Per-user configuration file. See CONFIGURATION.

/etc/libao.conf or ~/.libao

Global/per-user audio output configuration. See libao documentation at http://xiph.org/ao/doc/config.html

The configuration file consists of simple key = value lines, each terminated with a newline (\n) character. Keys are case sensitive.

act_* keys control pianobar's key-bindings. Every one-byte character except for \x00 and the special value disabled are allowed here.

Show keybindings.
Love currently played song.
Ban current track. It will not be played again and can only removed using the pandora.com web interface.
Add more music to current station. You will be asked for a search string. Just follow the instructions. If you're clueless try '?' (without quotes).
Bookmark current song or artist.
Create new station. You have to enter a search string and select the song or artist of your choice.
Delete current station.
Explain why this song is played.
Add genre station provided by pandora.
Show history.
Print information about currently played song/station.
Add shared station by id. id is a very long integer without "sh" at the beginning.
Delete artist/song seeds or feedback.
Move current song to another station
Skip current song.
Pause playback
Pause/resume playback
Resume playback
Quit pianobar.
Rename currently played station.
Select another station. The station list can be filtered like most lists by entering a search string instead of a station number.
Ban song for one month.
Show next songs in playlist.
Create new station from the current song or artist.
Select quickmix stations. You can toggle the selection with 't', select all with 'a' or select none with 'n'.
Decrease volume.
Reset volume.
Increase volume.
Change Pandora settings.
Replacement for %@ in station format string. It's " @ " by default.
Select audio quality.
Stream decoded, raw audio samples to a pipe instead of the default audio device. Use sample_rate to enforce a fixed sample rate.
Auto-select last remaining item of filtered list. Currently enabled for station selection only.
Play this station when starting up. You can get the stationid by pressing i or the key you defined in act_songinfo.
Icon for banned songs.
This sets the interface name to use as outgoing network interface. The name can be an interface name, an IP address, or a host name. (from CURLOPT_INTERFACE)

It can be used as a replacement for control_proxy in conjunction with OpenVPN's option route-nopull.

Audio buffer size in seconds.
Path to CA certifiate bundle, containing the root and intermediate certificates required to validate Pandora's SSL certificate.
Non-american users need a proxy to use pandora.com. Only the xmlrpc interface will use this proxy. The music is streamed directly.
File that is executed when event occurs. See section EVENTCMD
Location of control fifo. See section REMOTE CONTROL
Available format characters:

%i Song number

%a Song artist

%t Song title

%r Rating icon

%d Song duration

%@

The at_icon

%s

Song’s station, if not the current station.

Message format strings. %s is replaced with the actual message.
Now playing song message format. Available format characters are:

%t Song title

%a Song artist

%l Album name

%r Rating icon

%@ at_icon if station is quickmix, empty otherwise.

%s Real station name if quickmix

%u Song detail url

Now playing station format. Available format characters are:

%n Station name

%i Station id

Time format.

%e Elapsed time

%r Remaining time

%s Sign

%t Total time

Pandora sends a ReplayGain value with every song. This sets a multiplier so that the gain adjustment can be reduced. 0.0 means no gain adjustment, 1.0 means full gain adjustment, values inbetween reduce the magnitude of gain adjustment.
Keep a history of the last n songs (5, by default). You can rate these songs.
Icon for loved songs.
Max failures for several actions before giving up.
Your pandora.com password. Plain-text.
Use output of command as password. This setting is overridden by specifying a password with password.
Use a http proxy. Note that this setting overrides the http_proxy environment variable. Only "Basic" http authentication is supported.
Force fixed output sample rate. The default, 0, uses the stream’s sample rate.
Sort station list by name or type (is quickmix) and name. name_az for example sorts by name from a to z, quickmix_01_name_za by type (quickmix at the bottom) and name from z to a.
Network operation timeout.
Icon for temporarily suspended songs.
Your pandora.com username.
Initial volume correction in dB. Usually between -30 and +5.

pianobar can be controlled through a fifo. You have to create it yourself by executing


mkfifo ~/.config/pianobar/ctl

Adjust the path if you set up a $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or changed the fifo setting. Afterwards you can write commands directly into the fifo. Example (next song):


echo -n 'n' > ~/.config/pianobar/ctl

n is the keybinding for "next song". If you customized your keybindings you have to use these characters to control pianobar. This behaviour may change in the future!

Another example:


while true; do;
nc -l -p 12345 -s localhost localhost > ~/.config/pianobar/ctl;
sleep 1;
done


echo -ne 'n\x1a' | nc -q 0 127.0.0.1 12345

pianobar can report certain "events" to an external application (see CONFIGURATION ). This application is started with the event name as it's first argument. More information like error code and description, was well as song information related to the current event, is supplied through stdin.

Currently supported events are: artistbookmark, songban, songbookmark, songexplain, songfinish, songlove, songmove, songshelf, songstart, stationaddgenre, stationaddmusic, stationaddshared, stationcreate, stationdelete, stationdeleteartistseed, stationdeletefeedback, stationdeletesongseed, stationfetchinfo, stationfetchplaylist, stationfetchgenre stationquickmixtoggle, stationrename, userlogin, usergetstations

An example script can be found in the contrib/ directory of pianobar's source distribution.

Lars-Dominik Braun <lars@6xq.net>