Living with a Slacker

I had been interested in Slacker for quite some time and when woot.com offered one of the players for $40-$50, I had to pick it up to give the service a try. There are two reasons I do not own an iPod 1) the requirement that iTunes be used to manage the songs on the device; and 2) I already carry enough gadgets around with me. But the price was too good to pass up, so I grabbed it.

What is a slacker? Well, think of it as a combination of last.fm and XM/Sirius radio. It is a portable mp3 player and you can put your own songs on it, but the best feature of the player: it downloads the music locally, without any effort on the part of the user. Whenever this thing is near wi-fi, it just refreshes the music catalogue, expunging songs you have banned, keeping songs you love and grabbing new music similar to the music you like. All this is commercial-free and requires no payment beyond the cost of the player.


You can become a paying subscriber, about $3 per month, which allows you to play loved tracks at any time. There is also an app for the iPhone or Blackberry, so you can try it for free if you have one of those.

The iPhone app is alright, but to me, it doesn't really add anything over the last.fm app. I have to be connected, and sometimes you just can't be connected to wi-fi or a 3G network. To really be killer, Slacker should get with the program and release an iPhone/Blackberry/Nokia/etc. app that takes, say, 2GB of your storage and uses it for the offline radio stations.

But if people knew about Slacker, it would simply be the final nail in the coffin that is XM radio. Because this is XM without the limitation of being in broad daylight. If you work in an office, fly on a plane, or drive through a tunnel, you will notice that XM drops right out. Not so with Slacker. Because it has downloaded the tracks locally, it is always available. And because of the auto-refresh feature, I have only once heard the same song twice. In that instance, I just switched stations -there are 15 on mine, better models have 25- and kept on rocking.

The Slacker player is great and has exceeded my expectations. Will I be keeping it? That is a tough question. Though I love this thing, I only use it at home if I have the computer off, or at work. I always have my Nokia phone with me, so I use it for music on the go, pocket space being at a premium. I would become a subscriber instantly if their downloadable app behaved like the stand-along player.

Let me know if you have tried Slacker, Last.fm, pandora, or any of the other music-in-the-cloud type applications. I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.
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