Knowing my love for Pandora, Dave sent me a link to Slacker a couple weeks back with a little nudge suggesting I try it out. The service has been getting ridiculously positive press reviews, and apparently the company will be launching its own hardware devices in the near future.
So how does Slacker stack up? The Web application is fabulous. It is extremely easy to set up customized radio stations based on any range of musical artists. Any artist in your list also brings up recommendations for other artists in the same genre that you can choose to add to your station. Then there’s a nifty little function called fine tuning. Fine tuning lets you decide the levels of music discovery you want to include in your channel, as well as how popular the songs should be, how often your personal favorites should be included, and what musical eras can be referenced. It sounds complicated, but in reality the fine tuning function is simple, fast and very powerful.
I’ve had some issues with Slacker crashing on me, but not enough to deter me from using the beta application. My bigger issue is that right now, I’m addicted to the Squeezebox and being able to access customized radio without my PC. We’ll have to see what happens when the Slacker hardware comes out later in the year. Whether I think it’s worth converting to Slacker will probably depend on two things: