Now I hear ads

[brianpipa]

Question... I had been using Pithos for a few years and never heard a single ad (and I haven't paid for Pandora One). Yesterday, I lost my OS and reinstalled linux and Pithos, and now I hear ads. Just wondering if something changed in Pithos (later version plays ads?) or if it's just a coincidence and Pandora figured out how to force Pithos/the Pandora API to play ads and it just so happened to coincide with me reinstalling (which seems... coincidental)? In Pithos, the ads display as a normal song part of my playlist, only they are ~25 seconds long versions of the song (and it's not the song, it's an ad).

The only difference I know of is that in my new version, I chose aacplus and I usually choose MP3. I don't know how/if that would cause ads to start playing.

On my new machine, I have Pithos 0.3.17.

BTW - I have no problem with ads, especially since I'm not paying, just curious how/why they just started playing.
Thanks,
Brian

[TingPing]

Considering you are using an ancient release nothing changed in Pithos. Using the latest version I don't get any ads.

[gregsheremeta]

@brianpipa Let us know if it happens with the latest release, 0.3.18

[brianpipa]

So, I have 0.3.17... how do I upgrade to 0.3.18? I'm on linux mint (an Ubuntu variant). I tried the instructions on http://pithos.github.io/ which says:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kevin-mehall/pithos-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pithos

and that just gets my 0.3.17. The last command just outputs:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
pithos is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 306 not upgraded.

In digging further, the first command,
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kevin-mehall/pithos-daily
says

You are about to add the following PPA to your system:
 Stable builds of Pithos, a pandora.com player for the GNOME desktop.

More info at http://kevinmehall.net/p/pithos/


 More info: https://launchpad.net/~kevin-mehall/+archive/pithos-daily
Press [ENTER] to continue or ctrl-c to cancel adding it

and if I go to that link:
https://launchpad.net/~kevin-mehall/+archive/pithos-daily
it only mentions 0.3.17 and doesn't have 0.3.18. So how do I upgrade to 0.3.18 on Ubuntu?

[TingPing]

You have to manually install from source and manually install all of the deps as mentioned on the homepage.

You can get the ubuntu specific dep list from here: https://github.com/pithos/pithos/blob/master/debian/control#L16

[gregsheremeta]

If you want to hold off on installing from source, I should have 0.3.18 in our PPA by week's end.

[brianpipa]

ok, cool - I'll hold off and wait til it's in the PPA. It's not a big enough "problem" for me to manually install. Thanks!

[dstryj2]

Happy to see someone beat me here. What I noticed is that it shows the song playing, but instead it is ad playing. I look forward to the update and thanks for all you do!

[Sammidysam]

This could be related to Pandora's work. A similar issue was opened in Pianobar. I have not personally encountered ads, however.

[NickGeek]

I know this is an unpopular opinion but maybe it might be a good idea to keep ads in, just mark them as ads (previously it was shown as a song).

[Sammidysam]

I am pretty sure the majority of users have not heard ads. I have the latest release, 0.3.18, and have heard no ads at all. Does the majority hear ads now?

[TingPing]

@NickGeek We certainly don't plan on blocking ads, I was just curious if the latest version did it for him. As for 'marking' them as ads, could you elaborate?

[NickGeek]

@TingPing What would happen is an advertisement would play when a song was meant to play (because pithos isn't programmed for pandora's ad breaks) and the ad would replace the song.

For example I would see "White Shadows" by Coldplay lasting only 20 seconds with lyrics like "20% off, blah blah blah". I'm not 100% sure if pandora supplies the info but if they do the title of the track, etc could change to "Advert" or something like that.

[TingPing]

If it is integrated into the song file itself it would be impossible to detect, or did you mean the real song doesn't play? The pianobar debug info linked above shows nothing about ad info, though I'd have to experience it first hand to get more information.

[NickGeek]

@TingPing Yup. I thought that might be an issue. I was hoping Pandora might include extra metadata for ads but it seems they don't.

[NickGeek]

If anyone is interested v0.3.18 does remove the ads (at least that's what I got from 3 hours of testing on LMDE).

[Matthew9170]

@NickGeek I believe the problem is on Pandora's end not a Pithos or Pianobar problem as this is now happening to Pianobar (Pithos's backend). I started hearing ads on Pianobar about a week or 2 ago and I could go hours or days without hearing one and then one will just slip up and play.

[myano]

I'm running a modified 0.3.17 that I hacked up a while back (some time last year I added libre.fm support in a very inefficient way :-( ) and I have yet to upgrade (and yet to be forced to upgrade) and I have never heard an ad.

Although, about 6 months ago I started paying for Pandora on a yearly basis so that would explain the reason why I would not have heard any ads recently.

My two cents: I doubt Pandora would go to the length of adding the ads to the songs themselves because this would require much processing power on their end for the very few users who don't use an interface they didn't create. (I'm imagining that the vast majority of people using Pandora are using their mobile apps or their website instead of desktop applications like Pithos, Pianobar, etc..) Though, what I could see them doing as it wouldn't be too difficult, processing-wise, would be to mess with the tagging information in the audio file to make the ad file/stream appear to be the previous song or the next song.

[TingPing]

Obviously Pandora would be the one changing this, I don't think anybody is debating that :P

[myano]

@TingPing Heh, I didn't mean for my points to come off as "Pandora must be doing this," but rather a "how" they are doing it, because I imagine any time Pandora makes any change on their site the dozens of desktop and custom applications that communicate with Pandora's servers have to update or change their software to accommodate it.

[NickGeek]

@Matthew9170 You're right, I'm starting to get ads again on the latest version.

[TingPing]

Back on the topic of this issue though. Playing ads is not an issue and we can't even detect them since Pandora's api doesn't mark them as such (afaik). Subscribe to Pandora One if you want to avoid them.

[boscorama]

Heh. I actually came here to ask if there was any way to ignore tracks of 30sec or less since all the ads fall into that time-frame.

[TingPing]

@boscorama Somebody could make a plugin if they wish to do so, we won't be blocking them by default though.

[NickGeek]

I agree with @TingPing, ads shouldn't be blocked but I do think that any song that is 30 seconds or less should be marked as an advertisment.

[brianpipa]

Another data point... since that first (and only) day I heard ads, I haven't heard any since and I did not upgrade pithos (I'm still on 0.3.17) - everything is still the same on my end. Granted, over the holidays I wasn't at work so I wasn't listening 8 hours a day like I usually do. I can update in a day or two if anyone is interested.

[brianpipa]

Just heard my first ad since the last time I reported. They seem to happen VERY infrequently... I have been listening to pithos today for over 4 hours easily.

[brianpipa]

ok, just heard another... another data point... I use last.fm scrobbling... while the ad was playing, the last.fm site said I was listening to the song it was masquerading as... when the ad finished and I refreshed last.fm, the song went away - so it didn't count as a listen to the song.

I'll now stop reporting on this and (attempt to) upgrade to the latest version of pithos

[gregsheremeta]

Thanks for the feedback. We highly recommend Pandora One :)

[brianpipa]

@gregsheremeta I'm fine with ads, always have been, I was just letting you guys know :)

Now, after upgrading to 3.18 and I have the buffering problem mentioned in issue #44

[gregsheremeta]

Might want to revisit this in 0.3.18 -- reinstall from ppa. Previous 0.3.18 was badly packaged.

[SicVolo]

I have an idea of what could be happening.

Pandora wants to push ads to non-standard clients to monetize on the OpenSource/Linux/geeky audience. Right now the only way they can reliably do this is by inserting ads into the stream as short songs.
Now, they don't want to do it for everyone, because for the normal/sanctioned clients it doubles the ad rate. The normal clients show ads via a side pull, so the ads in the stream would be an extra annoyance. It's hard to tell clients apart thought, because internally Pithos uses the "android-generic" client key, same one that other android clients use.

To get around this problem Pandora runs some heuristics on the servers to determine if you (the listener) are a normal client user or pianobar/pithos/etc user. If you don't make the cut, you start hearing the ads inside the stream. If you do, you hear no ads, until the next time they run stats on your account. You could possibly sway the heuristics the other way by running Pandora's standard web/androd client for a while, fall below the threshold and thus stop getting the stream ads inside pianobar/pithos.