Slacker Radio

Slacker Radio is doing a promotion giving away a free 1 month subscription to their new premium service. How is this different from what they had before? I don't really know. For me streaming subscription services have been an interesting novelty, but they've offered nothing that interests me. I have a music collection that I've been building for over 25 years, I'm still building it, why would I want to pay someone to feed me crap that I may or may not want to hear? On the other hand, I like free stuff, so I signed up for the free month of premium service two days ago, and haven't stopped listening. I've temporarily put aside AudioGalaxy, possibly the best streaming service so far, for Slacker Radio, not so that I can burn up my free time, but because I've been blown away by what this new version has to offer. I started off by creating My metal station, which is seeded by artists from my teenage years. No big deal, cool tunes, and it generates new artist suggestions fairly well. Then it started to get better. No commercials. No commercials is good. I found that I could add a news feed in there, so now periodically I have a news update. Also cool. Next, I get a tune by a band that I like, but the tune doesn't belong in my custom station, and I started to realize how much better this rating system is than the complicated stuff I've built in to iTunes. I can simply ban a song from ever showing up in this station, but I haven't removed my ability to automatically add it to other stations. Same thing with artists. VanHalen showed up, banned em. I'm well on my way to building what would have been my perfect high school radio station.

I'm messing around with controls, clicked on an album cover, and what do I see? A track listing of the album to which the current song belongs, and better, a button that lets me play that album, start to finish. Holy shit. An online radio station just crossed the line in to the perfect total listening control that has kept me off of really getting in to online radio. I admit that I may be a dinosaur, but I come from the days of going to the record store, buying a cassette tape, and listening to an album start to finish, just as it was intended. For me, this is a killer feature. The issue is, like everything related to the music industry, licensing. It looks like the album playing (along with the ability to browse to specific tunes to play on demand) doesn't have the correct licenses, you can't play it when you want to.

Sound quality is killer as well. During my commute I've connected my Nexus S to my bluetooth hands free kit, and directed the output to my car stereo. Not a skip, and full rich sounds. Sure, it'd sound better if it were CDs, but still, very good solid sound. It's handled jumping between 3g and Edge without a skip, which has made this service much more enjoyable.

Aside from commuting, I've been working quite a bit from home, and it's been awesome cranking this through the amp attached to old school KLH speakers. I haven't tried it on my google tv yet, but I'm sure that will be quite nice as well. Really, this is just about the ability to listen to the service anywhere I have a computer, and with me, a professional geek, there is some form of computer just about anywhere I go.

Slacker has kindly created several stations for users to choose from, but frankly, I don't care. I may plug in to the news station and give it a run, but other than that, playlists and stations that I didn't create rarely match my tastes.

Slacker has given me the ability to create stations vs. playlists. What's the difference? I haven't got the slightest idea. I may take some time and mess around with the playlist functionality and see how that differs from stations. If it's cool, I'll talk about it.

There are several other features, things I'm sure are more popular, but they don't mean much to me. I can tweet things, more a novelty than anything else. I can send tracks to friends, I can share my station, but really, I enjoy my music because I enjoy it. Not because I can make it a social experience. There are links to buy things, but this is a little clunky. If I click "Buy" it looks up the track's album on Amazon. It works, but it's not cleanly integrated like everything else.

So, what are the downsides? So far, mostly just the price. I've got a hefty music collection of my own, which is available to me everywhere I can get slacker through the use of Audiogalaxy, and I can do it for free. Slacker premium, on the other hand, is gonna cost me $9.99 if I choose to go through with the subscription purchase. I have to admit, though, that I'm impressed enough that I'm actually considering it.

What is it missing? A couple of things. These are important to me, and may not reflect the desires of the general population.
I would like to have this integrate directly with my own collection where the songs will attempt to load equally from tracks I own along side of the catalog on Slacker's servers. I know for a fact that I own things they don't have access to, and I'd like to work that stuff in. Without that, I can't totally switch over.
I would like to have access to my own music through the use of a helper app that I run on my own computer. The reason for this is that I am not willing, under any circumstances, to pay for a music locker to hold my own tunes on someone else's server. If a service was willing to give me enough free space in a locker to hold my collection, that's a different story, but it's not likely to happen. Google Music Beta might do it, but we'll see how well that works once I finally get my invite to the service.
I want customizable caching. By this, I mean I want the ability to tell the custom station to continue to load the next tracks, but download those to my phone, allowing me to specify the amount of space to use. Cached tracks would also allow me the same ability to ban songs/artists, and report that data back to the servers when the servers are available. If Slacker allows this I haven't figured out how to use it.

Anyway, I guess I better get back to work. I'm just killing time here waiting for RIM's stupid licensing servers to become available so I can get to testing and debugging a new driver.