2024.12.5
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Pandora

If you have a Pandora account, you can control it from Home Assistant with this media player.

Important

This integration is only available on Home Assistant Core installation types. Unfortunately, it cannot be used with Home Assistant OS, Supervised or Container.

Installation of Pianobar

This media player uses the Pianobar command-line Pandora client, which you have to install separately. This can be done on a Raspberry Pi 2/3 with Raspbian Jessie as follows . (Note: Other platforms may have different installation processes)

The version of pianobar that comes with Jessie has a bug, so you have to build a more recent version. The latest version depends on a recent version of libraries associated with FFmpeg, so you should make sure you go through the backport process documented in The FFmpeg integration before doing this. Install the following basic dependencies:

sudo apt-get install git libao-dev libgcrypt11-dev libfaad-dev libmad0-dev libjson-c-dev make pkg-config  libcurl4-openssl-dev

And now install the backported FFmpeg-related libraries (note that if you’re using an older version of FFmpeg for other things on this machine, you may encounter issues after doings this):

sudo apt-get -t jessie-backports install libav-tools libavcodec-extra libavcodec-dev libavfilter-dev libavformat-dev

Now clone the Pianobar repository and build pianobar:

git clone https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar.git
cd pianobar
make clean && make
sudo make install

Configure Pianobar to auto-login and start playing a station (optional, see man pianobar) by creating and editing the ~/.config/pianobar/config file:

password = Password
user = you@youraccount.com

Test it out by running pianobar in the command line. You should be able to listen to your Pandora stations.

Configuration in Home Assistant

The Pandora player can be loaded by adding the following lines to your configuration.yamlThe configuration.yaml file is the main configuration file for Home Assistant. It lists the integrations to be loaded and their specific configurations. In some cases, the configuration needs to be edited manually directly in the configuration.yaml file. Most integrations can be configured in the UI. [Learn more] file. After changing the configuration.yamlThe configuration.yaml file is the main configuration file for Home Assistant. It lists the integrations to be loaded and their specific configurations. In some cases, the configuration needs to be edited manually directly in the configuration.yaml file. Most integrations can be configured in the UI. [Learn more] file, restart Home Assistant to apply the changes. The integration is now shown on the integrations page under Settings > Devices & services. Its entities are listed on the integration card itself and on the Entities tab.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
media_player:
  - platform: pandora

That’s it! Now you will find a media player. If you click it you will find all your stations listed as different sources. If you switch to one, the station will begin playing.

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