Bandito is a very useful app that lets you listen to and interact with Pandora from the menubar, without ever needing to open a web browser tab. All the information that the application needs is your Pandora login and password. Once you have entered that, it will start playing your Pandora stations.
As I noted above, Bandito runs on the menubar. When you click on its icon, you will see a small window that has some controls at the top, album art in the middle and some information at the bottom. You can also share what you are listening to on Facebook or Twitter. You can click on the small drawer button at the bottom to launch a new Pandora station or switch between your current stations. A nice feature is the ability to shuffle all your stations into one constant stream of music.
Hotkeys allow you to do easily access all of the application's features. You can play and pause, go to the next track, adjust the volume, mute, thumb a station up or down, show your stations, open the preferences and quit the application. Although these are not global hotkeys, you can set a global hotkey to open Bandito, and once the app is active all the hotkeys will work.
In the time I spent with Bandito, I was able to listen to my stations without interruptions and everything worked like I expected it to. I searched for new stations and rated them too. I am very happy with this app, and I will keep it handy.
v1.1 [Aug 3, 2012]
Bandito v1.1.7 now remembers the last station you were listening to when starting up. We also fixed some login issues with Pandora and some graphic display issues for retina users. This version also adds the ability to view the Pandora site from within the Bandito app to help remedy playback issues.
