Support media session API

[Raccoon]

https://web.dev/media-session/

What does the media session API mean for users? It means media key integration, media metadata such as title, artist name, album name and artwork. It also means assistant support (good for a11y) and picture in picture support (although you'd have to add a button for PiP yourselves, it's a lot easier once you add support for the media session API). 

You may have also heard of "PWAs". What it really means is making your web player faster, responsive (so you can shrink the window (great for multitasking, just like PiP is)) and most importantly, including a web app manifest so users can "install" it. There are things like service workers too. 

 Even when I was logging into my Pandora account to post here and to upvote feedback, there was a stupid splash screen. What are you doing that requires a splash screen??

By the way, this very text field keeps scrolling to the top when I move my cursor by tapping. I'm on my phone by the way. I could only read that banner that tells you that upvoting was added by rotating my phone. Do you not test? Maybe I'm too hard on myself when I do stuff. People expect more of me though. 

Oh and consider adding support for the web share API

[Raccoon]

I tried contacting Pandora support and a robot replied. I didn't know that this forum existed. Pandora seriously needs to work on the discoverability of this. Pandora should also come back to Australia 🙄

[Raccoon]

@TannerPandora hey just wondering if you or anyone else at pandora saw this. what're your thoughts?

[TauNeutrino89]

I'll second this, it would be excellent to be able to pause via keyboard instead of fumbling through windows and tabs to pause the music when someone comes in and starts talking to me.

[snaphat]

I implemented support for the media session API in a userscript. I may make it into a FF/Chrome/Edge extension.
https://github.com/snaphat/pandora_media_session

[snaphat]

I created Chrome, Edge, and Firefox extensions adding media session support. They are available at the link I posted above.

There are other extensions for Pandora Radio that offer media-key keyboard support by the way.

[tczx3]

This was working wonderfully in Edge (Chromium).  We did an upgrade to Windows 10 20H2 and also to edge 90.  I can't be for sure when exactly this broke, and it may be unrelated to our upgrades.  That said, the Hardware Media Key Handling only works for the first song played after page load and then doesn't function anymore.  I have to reload the page and then it works again until the next song is reached.

[snaphat]

I will check on my side both the windows update and chrome/edge update today

[snaphat]

I just realized I already had 20H2 (and I just updated to 21H1), and the newest Edge 90, and it's been working on my side (I checked both the extension and userscript). A couple of questions, does it work in other browsers and does hardware media key handling work correctly with other websites within edge?

It seems like there might be something else going on here. Though I'm not sure how helpful I will be able to be with this, it might be best for you to post on an issue on the issue tracker on github (so we don't flood this post) and we can continue the conversation there.

[Pandora]

We appreciate your contribution to our Feature Request board! Due to inactivity, this post has been archived and cannot be voted on or commented on. If you have any additional suggestions, feel free to share them or vote for them if they are already mentioned in the Feature Request post.