Coming Soon: Slacker Personal Radio!

[jalpert]

Not much information as of right now, but Pandora and Last.FM are pretty much doomed if these guys do a good job offering their service on the iPhone. Don't get me wrong, both Pandora and Last.FM are awesome, but neither offers the amount of control that Slacker does.

There is one main difference with slacker for those that are not familiar with the company:

You can start a radio station with a 15 band minimum, turn suggestions off, and you will ONLY hear music from the 15 bands you selected. You can hear recent stuff, or old stuff or all stuff. You can select if you want to hear fringe stuff or mainstream stuff or everything. Slacker offers a ton of control. Anyway, here is a link to the blurb, CERTAINLY something to look forward to...

http://blog.laptopmag.com/source-slacker-iphone-app-in-the-works

 

[cenetti]

Pandora sucks because of low bit rate. It sounds like AM radio on 3G.
Last FM is awesome, amazing quality, very high bit rate and almost non existent buffering!!!!

When it comes to internet radio, 2 things I care about ;

- Bit rate
- Amount of buffering

Unless they come up with high bit rate (like last fm) and less buffering. They will join Aol and pandora in the useless junk basket.

 

[jalpert]

Pandora sucks because of low bit rate. It sounds like AM radio on 3G.
Last FM is awesome, amazing quality, very high bit rate and almost non existent buffering!!!!

When it comes to internet radio, 2 things I care about ;

- Bit rate
- Amount of buffering

Unless they come up with high bit rate (like last fm) and less buffering. They will join Aol and pandora in the useless junk basket.

One way this will ensure quality is with a caching mode. When you are in wifi range you can "refresh" your stations, it will download a bunch of songs and when you listen to your station you listen to your cache. You don't have to depend on cell signal, or worry about having to hit your 5 gig cap.

 

[elbirth]

This sounds pretty interesting, any ideas on if it'll be free or paid? I love Pandora on the computer and use the small app Pandoraboy on my Mac to have it in its own window with global hotkeys, which is incredibly handy and makes for a great music player while I'm working.

If Slacker is free I'd definitely check it out.... if it's paid, maybe only if it's under $8 or so

 

[Compile 'em all]

give me mobilescrobbler! I wonder when is it coming on 2.0

 

[tgwinn]

sweet..this could be cool. I hope that it works as well as pandora does as far as the lack of having to stop to buffer in the middle of the songs, but I hope the audio is much better than pandora which is very lacking in the midrange of the EQ. I wish that the app would give you a custom EQ or, use the eq settings in the ipod function of the phone. My car stereo only allows for fine tuning of the treble and bass, so for a problem such as the midrange, I am just out of luck.

 

[t0mat0]

Sounds good. It was a key problem with Pandora - you'd put a band into recommendations, then have to wait ages for one song to come, whn you might want to listen to back to back songs from them. All in the name of music company licences. yay...

 

[plumbingandtech]

FYI: Pandora (and I assume the other ones) stream like butter while driving around town.

At least it did for me on my 3G.

bye bye radio. (not that i listened to them much anymore anyways.)

 

[jalpert]

goto http://www.slacker.com and create a station, it's good stuff. Right now, like pandora you get 6 skips per hour for free. They might or might not have ads. If you pay them about $10/mo right now you gain:

No ads

Unlimited skips

you gain the ability to save songs you hear, you can play them from your library at any time...

Not too bad a business model, as of right now I have never heard a commercial on slacker but they reserve the right. They have to pay for it somehow.