Listening to Pandora from outside the US
02Jan08
I was using Pandora for more than a year while working in the UK and I was really sad when I found out that I had to stop using it when I moved to Greece due to licensing constraints.
I didn’t give up. I did some research on proxy servers and web anonymity and I was really happy to discover a cool set of tools that could do the job. Those tools are FoxyProxy (firefox addon), Tor & Vidalia (it is included in Tor). Installation and Setup is simple and it takes a few minutes if you follow the steps below.
After installing the above tools I had to run Vidalia (which is basically a controller UI for Tor) have a look at the network and select a few available US servers with decent latency.
Then I had to add those servers to the torrc configuration file which can be accessed from the Start menu (\Start \Programs\Vidalia Bundle\Tor). Please not that the first 3 lines in the following notepad screen-grab are actually 1 since word wrap in on.
The last thing I had to do was to configure FoxyProxy and add the following patterns:
After finishing all the above steps I was able to listen to my favourite radio stations. My next goal is to access BBC’s iPlayer from Greece. 🙂
If you have any questions please feel free to post a comment.
Filed under: Anonymity | 28 Comments
Tags: Anonymity, foxyproxy, pandora, tor, vidalia
About stuff 
Hello there,
I was not able to follow your instructions as I am poor at technical thingys. I did find though a site called http://www.globalpandora.com which works for me.
Regards,
Ben
Thanks for the link Ben. It’s working indeed! 🙂
I am not sure though how long it will last.
Dimitris
Would you have any advice on where to find a good site for finding IP Proxy addresses?
If I can find a working UK IP address and use it as a proxy, I can listen to BBC radio football commentaries (blocked outside the UK). The problem is finding addresses which work, and if so, continue to work for 90 minutes! ;0)
Cheers, David
Hi Dimitris,
Thank you very much… Pandora is now working perfectly for me here in Singapore!
Thanks to Ben for the Global Pandora link, hope it stays up there for a while.
Cheers, Rick
Tom: My pleasure! 🙂
David: Are you referring to TOR IP addresses or normal proxies? I will have a look and let you know.
Just normal proxies – I usually try addresses listed at http://www.samair.ru/proxy/
but many of them don’t work or are unreliable. When they work it’s great… ;0) but when they don’t… :0(
Dimitris,
Brilliant guide, so nice to have pandora back in the uk, 25 minutes after it was cut off 🙂 (they were a long 25 minutes!!)
One thing i will mention about your guide is it’s not obvious that when editing Torrc it’s that you have word wrap on. It might be worth mentioning that the first 3 lines are actually 1 line.
Anyway, thanks again. I don’t think I could have gotten through the day without pandora, last.fm just doesn’t cut it!
Jon
Thanks Jon for your comments. I know exactly how you felt. I couldn’t access it for more than 2 months after moving to Greece and it was damn hard. 🙂
Thanks a ton! I’ve been without Pandora since the summer, when they blocked Canadian IP addresses. Your tutorial helped me get back what I’ve been missing greatly. Cheers!
you have just made me a very happy chappy… 🙂
Tastily says : I absolutely agree with this !
I don’t understand this tutorial at all. First I selected some servers and added them to the config-file.
But then you say:
“The last thing I had to do was to configure FoxyProxy and add the following patterns:”
configure what?!?! Indeed I am able to add the patterns to the patterns tab when adding a new proxy. But what do I fill out in the other tabs? Do I still have to search for some proxy that I fill in there?
Because I was expecting Tor to handle all proxy sh** now I checked the “connect to the internet directly (no proxy)” radiobutton in the proxy settings of FoxyProxy. But this doesn’t work for me.
So what do I do?
OK, so I found out by searching the web a little further. For anyone else who has this problem:
When setting up the proxy in FoxyProxy you do the following:
– In the first tab just give the proxy any name you want (ie. Pandora) and make sure the “active” checkbox is checked
– In the second tab (this is where I got stuck) you select “manual proxyconfiguration” and fill in the following settings:
-> Hostname: 127.0.0.1
-> Port: 9050
-> Check the “SOCKS proxy?” checkbox and select “SOCKS v5”
– From the third tab you continue following above tutorial by adding the patterns.
Good luck!
PS: Thank you for the great tutorial anyway 🙂
thanks soooooo much to the person who wrote the tutorial and PD! you solved my problem 😀
At last. I can listen to Pandora again. Marvelous. I’m gonna have a wonderful day today.
Thank you very very much.
😀
use Hotspot Shield and Pandora will work instantly 🙂 it´s free and save!
Thanks for the guide. 🙂
Unfortunately, it stopped working the next day and is still displaying the error “We’re having unexpected technical difficulties. Our engineers are scrambling to fix thins. Please try again later.” Have Pandora had problems for more then two days without apologizing on their blog, or have the exitNodes from this guide been blocked?
thank you so much really, it worked perfectly.
actually, i spoke too soon, no. it is not working, i have no idea where the problem arises, i’m able of doing everything on the website BUT listening to a playlist or creating one, it simply does not respond when i click on it. =(
*://*.pandora.com/* is better for the whitelist one.
I find the swf blacklist makes mine notwork.
Also, copy this to torrc to speed it up:
# Try for at most NUM seconds when building circuits. If the circuit isn’t
# open in that time, give up on it. (Default: 1 minute.)
CircuitBuildTimeout 5
# Send a padding cell every N seconds to keep firewalls from closing our
# connections while Tor is not in use.
KeepalivePeriod 60
# Force Tor to consider whether to build a new circuit every NUM seconds.
NewCircuitPeriod 15
# How many entry guards should we keep at a time?
NumEntryGuards 8
these proxy services are so awful slow. I broke down and bought a VPN for 5$/month from http://www.hidemynet.com .. Now I can stream pandora while watching HD hulu!!
i can’t manage it for mac os x
Hi, I’m mad about Pandora.
I’m trying to follow your instructions on my Macintosh. But when you say “…select a few available US servers…”, what must I do? What must I “select”, the name?, the ‘footprint?… 😦
After that, the Tor C document appears completely white… what must I paste there?
I’m totally lost.
Thanks anyway
I think the best solution for Pandora is VPN.
Greetings!