I’ve been a Pandora subscriber for a couple years and it’s slowly become a necessity at work and around the house. Its helped me discover most of the new music I listen to and been directly responsible for more firewall subversion activities at work than I care to mention.

One thing that has constantly nagged at me, though, is Pandora’s reliance on a web browser (the player is built with Flash). Even the Pandora “desktop app” that was released in 2008 using Adobe Air provided little more than a dedicated window for the web content and Flash player to load in.

Pandora finally decided to re-brand the entire paid subscription service as “Pandora One” and released a new Adobe Air based desktop app that feels a bit more native. Here’s a couple of initial impressions.

Pros:

• The layout is much cleaner and a clear departure from the web based client.
• You can choose between two audio stream qualities: Normal and High (192 kbps).
• The album art is higher res and looks a bit better.
• I can finally listen to music without fear of the player crashing my web browser.

Cons:

• There is no playlist or history. You can only see the current song playing. This is a disappointment, since I can’t always give a track the thumbs up/down while its playing. Once the song transitions, it’s gone.
• The pop-up notification feature is sluggish and annoying. If you skip a bunch of songs quickly, it notifies you about each one at a painstakingly slow pace. There’s no option to move the popup window to another screen corner or to control the speed of the fade in/out.  To be fair, it can be disabled. But I’d actually like to use this if the implementation had a few more features.
• The player still eats a ton of memory. Even though it’s outside the browser, the average amount of RAM consumption after a few hours hovers around the 120MB mark. That’s pretty ridiculous for a small music player.

None of the cons are real deal breakers for me (I still use it everyday). I do hope they keep working on the desktop app though. I understand the advantage of using flash for cross platform support, but it’d be nice to see a real native player written in something like Qt in the near future.