Slacker has been doing my music playlist for the last couple months and now that I’ve fine tuned it, it has been doing an exceptional job. If you’re into alternative (Daughtry/Foo Fighters), pop-punk (Cartel/Boys like Girls), easy-listening (Jack/Dave), some good hip-hop songs (Kanye/Bone Thugs), and a few country hits (Tim/Kenny) then you should really hit the play button below.
• 172 artists added to the list
• 426 favorite songs
• 92 banned artists (yes, Britney & N’Sync are part of it)
• 173 banned songs
• Some discovery; familiar popularity; minimum favorites; recent year
If you like what you hear, you can bookmark the link below to the station on Slacker.com:
http://www.slacker.com/?sid=stations/1365879/1180539106
Slacker.com is about a month old internet radio service that has finally won my heart (and bandwidth) after getting some of the initial kinks worked out. I was previously using Pandora (you choose artists, it plays like-songs) and Finetune (you choose every song it plays) for my radio at work. Pandora was easy and often played songs I didn’t want to hear while Finetune was better quality selection but much more work. You might like Slacker if you like the idea of adding artists you want to hear to a custom station and ban songs you never want to hear. It will let you skip up to 6 songs per hour. They plan to release an ipod-like portable player and if you want more info on that I would recommend reading GigaOm’s post below.
GigaOm states some constructive criticism along with his confirmation of the portable player pricing:
The company will sell portable players that are Wi-Fi enabled and have satellite radio connectivity built into the devices in the second quarter of 2007. The devices will cost $150-to-$300 depending on the storage capacity. The service is free if you are willing to put up with advertisements and a pause after six tracks. Otherwise you might have to cough up $7.50 a month for the premium offering.
SAVE YOURSELF THE WORK: here are two stations I’ve created. I am continuously adding artists and banning songs to these to really make them to my taste. Let me know what you think of the selection in the comments if you do decide to try them out!
- My MIX!167 plays the best music from 311, Cartel, Blink, Jack & Co, Dave, Plain White T’s, Mat Kearney and basically all other non-country artists.
- My Country Station plays Kenny, Keith, Toby, Tim, B&D and all the popular (mostly male) artists.
Here is a screenshot of the “finetune” abilities of Slacker. You can specify if you want it to go beyond your list of artists added to the station to discover new artists (much like Pandora does currently). I chose to turn this off because I have pretty much added every artists I even want to hear and the reason I can’t stand Pandora is because it does play too much crap from those “discovery artists”. You can also specify the popularity of songs it plays as well as the time frame (oldies through most recent). It has played quite a few songs from 2007 albums in my mix (another downside that was for Pandora and Finetune was lack of current songs).