I love Pandora and I think they do a great job of monetizing their service. The $1 surcharge on heavy use is pretty minimal and their audio ads are short and fairly infrequent. However, I keep getting one audio ad that I absolutely hate but cannot ignore. It pulls my attention away from what I’m doing and I am compelled to either take my headphones off or mute the sound to avoid accumulating aggravation.
The duct-tape solution for my Ubuntu box is a script that simply mutes the sound for 30 seconds. I link to the script with an icon on Gnome’s toolbar and also map it to “CTRL-M” to allow for quick activation. The script is below; the only thing you might need to do is change the soundcard index (the “0” in “-c 0 …”) on your system.
#!/bin/sh
amixer -c 0 sset Master,0 mute
sleep 30
amixer -c 0 sset Master,0 unmute
