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This is simply a little information onto my effort into this project. First off, I think the native Android Pandora client works great for the average user. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of an audio nut, and the audio quality from the native app is atrocious! I'm also a Pandora One subscriber, so the fact that this app circumvents ads isn't an issue for me as I already get my Pandora radio ad free. All I want is Pandora's mp3-hifi audio quality from a mobile app, and that's where this project comes in. As soon as Pandora increases the capabilities of their own mobile app, I will probably drop all work on this. No worries though, at the rate that Pandora has been updating their mobile apps, that time is a long ways off.
Release change log: https://github.com/dylanPowers/pandoroid/wiki/Release-Change-Log
Latest APK release: https://github.com/dylanPowers/pandoroid/downloads
Requires Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or above. Android 2.2 is unsupported primarily because of a lack of encryption support (Blowfish to be exact).
This app works for both standard Pandora users, and Pandora users with a Pandora One account. For those with a standard account I would strongly recommend getting a Pandora One account seeing how this app doesn't have ads, and we should support this fantastic radio streaming service that Pandora provides. Plus you get the bonus of higher quality audio.
Audio Quality:
For standard Pandora users this app streams at 128k MP3 audio, and for Pandora One users it streams at 192k MP3 audio (metered network note: that's about 80MB an hour). This is an upgrade from Pandora's native app's quality of 64k AACPlus audio. The main difference between the 128k MP3 and 64k AACPlus streams is that for whatever reason, Android's native media player (at least in 2.3-Gingerbread) introduces artifacts into the audio for the 64k AACPlus stream. If it wasn't for these audio artifacts the 128k MP3 and 64k AACPlus would be indistinguishable in perceptible quality. For this reason, we are running the 128k MP3.