3tunes rendered useless

Okay, was this a shock at all? I mean even a little bit of a shock. No. The 3tunes program, which previously allowed users to store the mp3's that Pandora.com's flash player used on their hard drives has now been rendered useless. The program depended on the song title being present in the firefox toolbar. They took that away and no the program no worky. For the uninformed, Pandora.com is a web based self customized radio station of sorts that utilizes a flash based player which downloads tracks as mp3's which are untitled with no metadata, and plays them in your browser window. Normally you wouldnt be able to catalog these mp3's according to title, but the flash player updates (or did) the song title in the Firefox title bar. A very useful, but easily exploitable feature, once someone found out what folder the mp3's were being stored in.

This text is all that remains of the 3tunes homepage.

Pandora has removed the artists name & song title from the Firefox titlebar, this means that 3tunes no longer functions correctly. You may still copy the MP3 files over manually.

View the source here and download the source here.

I knew this shit was coming, but I mused about how useful the program could be here. It was obvious to me even then that this wasnt going to last.

At least they released the source code, as I was curious how they were reading out the title from the Firefox browser. The next pandora.com grab program will probably utilize an open source flash player or use screen scraping techniques. If I understand correctly the second is more likely because GNU Gnash, the GPL flash player, does not support interactions with the flash object, but is rather a basic movie player.