Muse review: Mac app makes Pandora even easier
Do you love Pandora? No, not just enjoy it, but really love it? If so, $5 and a Mac buys you Industrious One’s Muse, a desktop Pandora player that gives you all the Pandora goodness you’d find in a web browser, and a worthwhile bit more.
When you first launch Muse, you see a window that appears to be nothing more than a container for Pandora’s website. And that’s exactly what it is—complete with your stations, the New Station field for adding more stations, playback controls, thumbs up and down buttons, and any other elements Pandora has chosen to put on the page (including its ads).
So where’s the advantage? Muse provides additional—and welcome—control over Pandora in a couple of forms. To begin with, you no longer need to keep your web browser running (or even keep its resources busy) to listen to Pandora. And, unlike with a browser, you can close Muse’s window and the music continues to play.
But there’s some useful functionality here beyond cosmetics. The first is that you can assign keyboard shortcuts to such commands as Play/Pause, Next Song, Like Song, and Dislike Song. And these shortcuts work regardless of which application is front and center. So, for example, if you’re hacking away in Photoshop to the accompaniment of your Oasis station and Justin Bieber’s latest comes blasting out of the speakers, you can press something along the lines of Option-Delete to give Master Bieber’s track the thumbs down. You can also create shortcuts for showing or hiding the Muse window, and for showing an alert box with info about the currently playing track. (By default, this box displays the name, artist, and album of each track as it begins playing.)
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