Pandora is a fantastic website and concept, a radio station that plays music based on the mood you are in. You start out by specifying a song or artist that you like, the system then finds something very similar to that song or artist and streams it straight through your browser. As it plays each song, theres a simple “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” system, hit “thumbs up” and it learns that you like that type of music and plays more of the same and similar. In the same way, hit “thumbs down” and it skips to the next track it finds suitable.
There is a MASSIVE amount of choice, and its a good way to find new music you haven’t listened to before. Accounts are free and you can create multiple stations, for example I have seeded a station using Craig Armstrong, and called the station “Chilled Work”. So when I am at the office, I have my little Pandora Player sitting on the desktop playing some nice mellowed out tracks.
Now, although Pandora is a web based service, I have thrown a VERY BASIC (I must stress at how basic it is!) application together. You will need to have the flash plugin installed – but if you’ve been using the web service you’ll already have that. If you don’t have the .NET 2.0 framework, the installer will grab what it needs and install those files too.
Once installed, the application sits in the middle of your screen, just leave it up behind your other windows, this way you don’t have to have a web browser open all the time. I know most of us actually have a browser open all the time, but this prevents you from accidentally leaving the pandora site, and thus stopping your music.
Get the install files from here. Its a tiny 259Kb in size. If you have any comments (other than “this is really basic” – I’ve already covered that) or would like me to add specific features to it, just post a comment 
PS: Won’t work on 64bit OS, as Adobe don’t support 64bit Internet Explorer.