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How to listen to Pandora.com outside the US (without a VPN)

Back in the day, when Pandora was still accessible from outside of the US it was my main source for music recommendations (and I spent a lot of money on recommended music). Then the record industry decided to limit Pandora to the US only.

You can still listen to Pandora if you use a VPN solution like HotSpotShield but this means you will Tunnel all your computers traffic to some VPN and might not be able to access stuff that is on your local network (and you slow down your internet connection).

After a night with little sleep and some help from a very nice Twitter follower (who has a VP Server in the USA) I found a convenient way to listen to Pandora from here.

Step 1) Get a SSH account in the USA. Either you know someone who can give you one, or you get yourself a hosting package with SSH (e.g. hostmonster.com has rather cheap ones) or you try something like bshellz.net, for a one time payment you get a shell account with tunneling capabilities (might not be in the US, I am not really sure. There might be other services like this that are definitely in the US).

Step 2) Establish a SSH tunnel. If you are on a Mac, you can either do this via terminal by typing in:

ssh -D -p <port-number> -D 2001 <username>@<shell-host>

or you simply get the SSH Tunnel Manager freeware app and enter your data.
Be sure to enable “Enable SOCKS4 proxy” in the options. In the Terminal this is the -D switch. The number (in this case 2001) is the port you can access your socks proxy afterwards.
Now connect either using the terminal or SSH Tunnel Manager.

Step 3) You can now launch Firefox, install the FoxyProxy addon and configure it to use a socks proxy on host: localhost and the port you set up above. And you’re done.

Or you get even geekier:

Step 4) Open your plain text editor of choice (SubEthaEdit, Textmate, BBEdit or so) and add the following lines:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
// send all pandora.com requests through our socks proxy:
if (shExpMatch(url, “*.pandora.com/*”))                 {return “SOCKS localhost:2001”;}
if (shExpMatch(url, “*.pandora.com:*/*”))               {return “SOCKS localhost:2001”;}
// All other requests don’t need a proxy
return “DIRECT”;
}

Save this file as proxy.pac. This file will later tell your system to only route requests to pandora.com through the tunnel.
Step 5) Open System Preferences > Network. Now select your active network device (Airport or ethernet). Now click “Advanced” and then select the “Proxies” tab. In here change “Configure Proxies” to “Using a PAC file” and choose the file we just created. Click OK then click Apply. That’s it.
If the tunnel connection is established you are now able to access Pandora.com. To make it even more convenient, I recommend the free PandoraMan application.

Any questions?