Comment 13 for bug 919527

Just so everyone is aware, this time around, this is not the typical API change that could be just easily worked around.
See Promy's blog post for the technical details here: http://6xq.net/blog/2012/api/
But the basics of it are that, this time, Pandora is directly targeting 3rd party clients like Pithos and pianobar (and sadly mine, Elpis, that I just launched a couple months ago). This magic key that's been mentioned is basically a 32bit string that must be generated based on the *final* generated HTML of the pandora.com webpage. Meaning that you cannot just download the main HTML... you must download the HTML plus all CSS and javascript and then apply the CSS and javascript modifications to the page and THEN grab these several special div heights and hash them into a working key.

So, possible? Yes. Easy? Heck no.

I emailed Kevin back when this issue first came up and have not heard back from him yet and, since he hasn't posted on this bug yet, I'm not really sure what his intentions are but, from the looks of it now, even if we come up with a workable solution, Pandora is getting mighty serious about blocking us and it will just be a matter of time until it breaks again.

Also, yes, you guys are correct that sometimes it does work fine... but this is only as long as you basically never skip a song, change station or logout at the wrong time. It is spot-on that the API grabs 4 songs at a time, so that if you grab the next 4 song block and then switch stations or close the app and restart you can easily hit your 12 skip limit with out actually skipping 12 songs.

I've had users of Elpis still using it for a couple weeks now with no problem, but they never shut it down or skip.