For those of you who aren’t familiar with Notcom, he’s the guy behind the popular SHSH blob-saving tool TinyUmbrella. Thanks to him, we can rest assured knowing that our device blobs are safe in case they’re ever needed again.
Today, the developer unveiled a new project. It’s a questionable jailbreak tweak called pandy that allows you to save tracks from the Pandora music app to your iPod app. And unlike other music downloaders, it syncs with iTunes…
There’s no icon for pandy, or any options in the Settings app to configure. In fact, the only way you’ll know that it’s been installed is to look for the confirmation box that tells you that a song has been downloaded to your device.
So how can you control which tracks are being downloaded? You can’t. At least not yet anyway. Notcom says that this is the “have fun with this” version of the tweak, and he has plans to add more features to it with future updates. But even now the tweak is functional. It automatically downloads the ‘Now Playing’ song in Pandora, and adds it to your iPod app. It stays away from duplicates (must match exactly), you get album art when available, and it syncs with iTunes.
Now, we’re not lawyers, but we’re pretty sure downloading music for free like this isn’t exactly legal. At the very least it likely breaks Pandora’s TOS.
We can’t recommend using pandy – and we normally wouldn’t even give it any coverage – but we found it odd that someone like Notcom would even release such a tweak in the first place. Don’t forget that pirating music or pirating apps is the same in the eyes of the law. It’s surprising that Notcom, someone with a certain popularity among the jailbreak community, would come up with a tweak that downloads (pirates?) music from Pandora. We find it odd.
According to a comment Notcom posted on his site about the tweak, he seems to believe it is legal:
As recording radio* for personal at-home use is protected by law, I am creating a private repo which will host my tweak.
When asked about it, this is what Notcom had to say:
@sebastienpage recording radio is protected. Pandora is Internet radio. That hasn’t been decided in court. So far it’s fine until ruled.
— semaphore (@notcom) 5. März 2013
It still doesn’t look really legit to me.
If you still want to check it out for yourself, you’ll have to add notcom’s personal repo to Cydia. To do this, open Cydia > Manage > Sources > Edit > Add > type: http://apt.semy4.com/repo > and search for pandy. It’s completely free.
Do you think Notcom made a mistake by releasing this tweak?
