The world has ended, I’ve hit my 40 hour allotment of Pandora for the month. So what happens when you run out of 40 hours of Pandora. . .
This is where it gets interesting. I was joking about this with my co-workers this afternoon, since generally my Pandora is signed in and playing whenever I’m at work, which means I should hit my 40 hours in just a shade under a week every month. So expectedly I’ve hit the limit, so we figured just sign up for another account and sign in again and run through another 40 hours (which probably violates the TOS, but nevertheless. . .)
Nope, no chance, in fact the whole Pandora site changes over when you hit 40 hours. Gone is the registration link. No matter, I’ll remote desktop to another computer and register a new address and use it here since I can’t register locally. Nope! Logging in with a completely new registered e-mail address still says that I’ve listened to my 40 hours and am entitled to no more.
Alright, last try, let’s clear all of the browser caches/cookies/etc, and try again. Well, given that the site still has no register a new account link means it will make no difference. They’re clearly tracking usage by IP address, perhaps machine reported statistics, and obviously your username plays a role on some level (though obviously not entirely).
I wonder what happens on a shared IP address? Anybody out there know? Anybody else run into the 40 hour limit? I don’t mind paying the cheap cost of good quality music, but I’d like to know how their tracking these things.
UPDATE:
After paying $0.99 on about the 20th of the last several months I finally bit the bullet and gave Pandora my hard earned $36 for the year (it’s nice that I don’t have to dig around for the “don’t auto-renew button”, it’s just presented when you pay). I have to admit that the desktop app alone is worth the money, not having a bogged down browser is immediately apparent on an older computer, even when running with Chrome or with Pandora in a separate browser.
After some “careful” research, I’ve concluded that Pandora is storing player information in both a flash object, and tracking the time played by user account AND IP address, so if you want to continue to get more than 40 hours/month you need to have a separate account, a separate data/internet connection (you don’t have to clear flash cache or anything else) and then wait until you run one account out and switch over to the other for the rest of the month. I could pay ~$12/year by waiting until I run out each month but again the higher quality, no advertisements, 5 hour timeout and the dedicated player are all well worth it! YMMV
paying 99c to listen until the end of the month is easy though
alright. so i have three devices hooked up to my home network including mobile devices such as my iphone and cellular phone. As you may know, routers have one IP address. Soo all devices have one IP address. However, it is not the IP address they limit. I made a new account and was sucessfully able to do it from my laptop. however, as you stated, when i went up to sign in on my home computer, it gave me 40 hour access. Now, clearing internet cookies and every temporary file will NOT allow you to bypass it; why? because even tho everyone thinks sites leave just cookies and temporary internet files, they’re wrong. THERE ARE A TON OF OTHER SHIT THAT WEBSITES CAN EMBED IN UR COMPUTER. now. of course, no one wud want to do a complete restore and reinstall the Operating System, but my computer being very fast, quad processor, blah blah the works, and it restores within less than 20 minutes. So, trying Pandora with my new account on the home PC, yields sucess. no body really knows where pandora will hide extra cookies and stuff but who knows. all the files are hidden.!
An easy way to actually figure out what’s going on would be to run FileMon courtesy of Microsoft –
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545046.aspx
This is part of the sysinternals package created independently by Mark Russinovich and eventually purchased by Microsoft. It’s a very powerful utility set that in this case would allow you to monitor the system file I/O and should be able to figure out what files Pandora is touching 🙂 Let us know if you decide to give it a shot and figure it out!
OH!!! but i also JUST found out, that even tho Pandora limites it with cookies, most mobile devices like the iPhone cant except certain cookies that PC’s or Macs can. So!!! IM LISTENING TO PANDORA ON MY IPHONE EVEN THOUGH I REACHED MY 40 HOUR LIMIT!! YAY! now….lets hope they dont change it!
Pandora, being a flash object, stores its data not in cookies but in .sol files. These .sol files are called Local Shared Objects, essentially cookies for your flash player. This is why clearing the cache does not work, because the files are out of FF’s reach.
If or when Pandora complains about the allotted time (40 hours) being used for the computer, just go find the .sol files on your system. On my Ubuntu system, they are located in ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects. Simply deleting them will clear the hours tracking for the computer.
Pandora, being a flash object, stores its data not in cookies but in .sol files. These .sol files are called Local Shared Objects, essentially cookies for your flash player. This is why clearing the cache does not work, because the files are out of FF’s reach.
If or when Pandora complains about the allotted time (40 hours) being used for the computer, just go find the .sol files on your system. On my Ubuntu system, they are located in ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects. Simply deleting them will clear the hours tracking for the computer.
Looks like its per account and/or per computer. If you hit your limit, you need to delete the .sol files as mentioned, and sign in with a different account in order to continue listening…
Love the mystery. It may have taken me 40 hours and a thousand bucks to figure out how to save one penny, but that is all the fun. They should have figured we would do that. LOL
Yep.Just delete damn file. Pretty sure they come up with different solution. They can limit it to your IP but it is not good idea 🙂
Better solution: create a username on jango.com! Free music!
Aren’t their ads paying enough for everyone’s enjoyment? Perhaps Pandora needs to go back to the bargaining table and rethink their lame strategy. If you’re going to offer people free music, don’t give a hand out then take it away. That’s something our mothers told us when we were 5 years old.
You can also use another browser to get around the 40 hours. I normally use Firefox but when I reach my 40 hours I just open IE and use that with a 2nd account.
FREE PANDORA ONE WITH NO ADS:
Every day I just delete my .sol files and create a new account by filling out bogus info on the login page. Takes 10 seconds
When signing up for the new account it asks for my email and I just type random letters.
ex. jsjkfhfhjd@kdhshd.com
For the password I also type in random letters
ex. sjdjdjdhfhfhd (the best part is you dont have to type it in a second time like most password fields require). You do not have to actually log into the email to verify your account or anything- so a randomly typed email address will work.
for birth year I type in a random year
ex. 1988
Select “male” or “female”
check the I agree checkbox and hit submit.
Then I click the “upgrade” box on the top menu and then click the “get free 24 hour trial”. Create my stations and I am all set. No ads!
when 24 hours is up, delete the .sol files in the C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\4HBWHT4Z\pandora.com folder *replace the word USER with the windows user account name.
The entire thing takes about 20 seconds, to make it easier I created a shortcut to the address I mentioned above, and put that on my desktop. So I click the shortcut and it opens the folder, I delete the three files and log on and make my new account.
HOW TO MAKE THIS PROCESS EASIER IF YOU DO THIS EVERY DAY: The only thing that sucks is every time you delete the .sol files and make a new account you lose your fav stations so I plan on eventually making a script to automatically enter my favorite stations (can easily be done with a program called AUTO IT).