Audio

Sneak Peek: Slacker’s On-Demand Music Service

Tonight at the annual Pepcom holiday event in New York, Slacker will preview its new on-demand music service, a major upgrade to the existing application available on the Web, and on Android, Blackberry, and iOS phones. As long-time Slacker fans here at ZNF, we couldn’t be more excited about the launch. In addition to caching stations and enabling downloads of favorite tracks (available with today’s Slacker premium service), the new on-demand service will let users call up and play specific artists and songs at will. The new genre stations, pre-programmed by Slacker DJs, will provide details on the top station artists and songs, with an option to jump around to those tracks and others at any time. The search function will also provide more information on artists and songs, including what stations they’re programmed on, associated albums, etc. You’ll also be able to sort and play favorites easily, and there will be significantly more functionality for programming your own custom stations from any mobile interface.

Slacker is planning to roll out the on-demand upgrade in October. The company will continue to offer a free service tier, and users will be able to unlock higher tiers for a monthly fee: Slacker Plus at $3.99 per month and Slacker Premium (full on-demand functionality) at $9.99 per month.

I’ve always believed Slacker has the best feature set of any online music service. From the revolutionary offline caching function, to its customization capabilities, Slacker, in my opinion, outperforms the competition. However, its mobile implementations haven’t quite lived up to the browser experience, or to my dedicated Slacker hardware. And the interface has needed an update for some time. Assuming the new upgrade adds the necessary polish, along with the new features, Slacker should have itself a killer mobile music app.

UPDATE: The older Slacker Premium service, which I originally linked to in this post, is no longer available. If you’re interested, just hold out another month, and Slacker should have you covered with the new version.

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Stream Media from PC to iPhone with ZumoCast

Zumocast is a new app from the folks behind the ZumoDrive online storage service. While ZumoDrive is designed to let you quickly and easily upload files to the web and access them from any computer as if they were local files, Zumocast is kind of the opposite. You set up the ZumoCast server software on … Read more

RadioTime Launches TuneIn Radio App for Android

RadioTime is an online resource for finding and listening to internet radio streams. You can do that through the RadioTime web site, using a web-based audio player. But RadioTime first came to my attention years ago because the company offered an excellent plugin for Windows Media Center which allowed you to access internet radio from … Read more

Sony’s Qriosity: Curiouser and Curiouser

While most of the tech world was focused on the Apple event yesterday, Sony announced expansion plans for its streaming media service, Qriosity. Qriosity’s been around in the US for a few months, offering on-demand movie titles to consumers who own Sony connected devices. This week’s announcement adds five European countries to the distribution list, … Read more

Apple Teases iOS 4.2 with AirPlay Media Streaming

Been waiting (im)patiently for the Apple iPad to gain the multitasking capabilities that are already available for the iPhone and iPod touch? It looks like you might have to wait a little longer. Apple says the next update for the iPad will be iOS 4.2, which will also be available for the iPhone and iPod … Read more

No Official Sonos Android Controller in 2010 :(

Well that’s a bummer. Sonos responded in the negative to a Twitter inquiry regarding the possibility of an Android controller. Perhaps next year. In the interim, the partially functional and community developed Andronos will have to suffice. In other Sonos news, the Geek Tonic household increased their S5 count by two and had everything installed … Read more

Pandora Adding Genre-based Stations

One of the things that’s always seemed a bit odd about Pandora’s excellent internet radio service is that it doesn’t sort music by genre. Instead, you pick a song or artist you like, and Pandora will populate a custom-made radio station with songs that are similar in one way or another. Generally this works pretty … Read more

Zoom H1 Audio Recorder Debuts

Three years ago I was on the hunt for a good audio recording tool, and Brad Linder recommended the Zoom H2. Sadly my podcasting days were limited, but that doesn’t mean Samson’s H2 wasn’t a worthy purchase. (or a gift, in my case) It’s got 360-degree recording (4 mics), transcoding capabilities, and runs off two … Read more