Slacker – Your Radio Everywhere

All of my cars since 2004 have had satellite radio, and I can’t imagine not having it for my daily commute. I have quite a large CD/MP3 collection, and I own an iPod that I can connect to my car, but what I like best about satellite radio is the variety it provides. When I listen to my CDs or iPod, I find myself listening to the same music over and over. Terrestrial radio is no longer a viable option either, as they seem to play more advertisements than music these days.

Until recently, you used to be able to log in to the Sirius/XM website from your computer to listen online as well as in the car if you had an active subscription. Now they charge a few dollars a month for that feature. Not wanting to spend any extra money, I went looking for other solutions. That is when I discovered Slacker.

Slacker claims to be “your radio everywhere,” and I think they live up to that goal. To get started, visit www.slacker.com. Once you create a free account, you can select from the 16 categories of music and then choose one of the stations to listen to. The interface is very clean and easy to use, and the sound quality is great. Unlike terrestrial or satellite radio, you can even skip ahead up to 6 tracks a day. This means that if you’re listening to a station and a song comes on that you do not like, you can hit the skip button and the next song starts — something I’m sure we all wish we could do in our car. You also have the ability to indicate if you “like” or “dislike” a current song playing. The stations “learn” which music you like and will play more or less of it based on what you indicate. One of the coolest features of Slacker is the ability to create your own station. All you need to do is enter a song or artist you like and you’ll instantly be listening to a station with all similar music. You can leave as is or even fine tune the artists your station will play. They do show banner ads on the website, and there is an occasional audio ad played between songs, but they are not long or often. Nothing unreasonable for a free service.
Like all good businesses, they do have a paid service, Slacker Radio Plus, you can upgrade to for $3.99/month. The upgraded service gives you unlimited skips, song requests, no audio or banner ads and complete lyrics. You can get a free, seven-day trial as well when signing up.

To make your music portable, Slacker offers a variety of solutions including their own portable player, the G2, for $199.99. Their player allows you to cache up to 25 stations at a time (approximately 2,500 songs), either theirs or your own custom created stations. You can even load your own MP3, WMA, or AAC files on it as well. You don’t even have to connect the G2 to your computer to load it with music. Once you select the stations you want to listen to, which can be done from the Slacker website, it will connect over Wi-Fi to load the music. You can do this manually or set it to do it daily so you’ll always have new music to listen to.

Slacker also has free applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and Blackberry. You get all the same functionality of the web player and it works great over a 2G Edge, or 3G connection. You’ll want to make sure that you have an unlimited data plan, or you could be surprised with a large bill at the end of the month. One feature that the Blackberry has that the iPhone and iPod touch does not is the ability to cache stations. When listening to a station on my Blackberry, all I need to do is select “cache playing station” from the menu, and the next time I plug in my Blackberry to my computer with the USB cable, it will cache the stations I have chosen. This is a great way to save battery life and listen to music where you do not have cellular service, such as on a plane.

If you like music, you’ll definitely want to give Slacker a try. The quality is great; it’s easy to use, and best of all it’s free. What’s not to like?

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