Getting Started With Pithos
Start the application by searching for it in the Dash if you’re running Ubuntu or Mint Menu if you’re running Mint. When it loads for the first time, you need to provide it with your Pandora username and password, specify the quality of the music and set up other options but you can ignore them as it’d run perfectly without tweaking anything else. If you don’t have a Pandora account, then you’ve to create it first and for that, you need to use your browser.
Interface
The UI of Pithos is very simple not much, unlike Pandora. At the upper right corner, you get a list of your saved stations. On the upper left corner clicking on Pithos brings down a menu for Stations, Preferences, About and Quit. The media controls(Pause, Next and Volume) are located just below the Pithos icon at the upper left corner. The rest of the screen displays the songs that have been played, the one that is playing and the ones that are going to play next.
My Experience
Playing music on it is dead simple. Just click on one of your saved stations and it starts playing. One of the features that I like is the QuickMix station which plays tracks from all your selected stations. It’s useful for times when you’re not sure what you want to hear and just want to listen to some music quickly. In the free account version, you cannot listen to music on demand. If you want to add new stations then:
Click on the Pithos icon.Select “Stations” from the menu.Click on “Add Station” from the window that appears.Search for your preferred genre, artist, song, etc.Click “OK” and you’re done.
Music Content
Even though Pithos has no content of its own and is dependent solely on Pandora for streaming, still it’s worth pointing out that the music content of Pandora is very limited compared to other streaming services. Pandora has only around a million tracks while some streaming services offer well above 30 million songs but the silver lining is that the small library of Pandora is handpicked and promises better quality.
How To Install Pithos In Linux?
It can be easily downloaded from the software manager of Ubuntu and other Ubuntu-based derivatives like I do in this case on Mint. Just open up the software manager and search for “Pithos” and click on the result that shows. Click on the “Install” button and wait for it to complete. After the progress bar completes, Pithos is installed in your system. If you want to install it by the command line(considering you to love The Matrix-style 90’s look of the terminal as I do), then type the following commands:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install pithos
The installation is around half a megabyte, so it’ll install in no time.
Conclusion
Pithos is an extremely lightweight way to enjoy music on Linux from Pandora and it works sufficiently well. I’ve been listening to it from the moment I installed it for testing till now (I mean the time of writing of this review, not when you’re reading it of course). If you’re looking for a feature-rich application with a large library of tracks, this one’s not for you, I’d instead recommend you guys to try out Spotify instead. But if a simple lightweight application that can play some quality music without any extra clutter is what you want, then Pithos is for you.
