Slacker’s approach to integrating on-demand access to albums and songs is pretty straightforward, retaining the emphasis on radio while providing features comparable to the core ones offered by other subscription services. You still get both standard stations in an array of genres and ones you build and tweak yourself based on artists you choose. But now you can toggle between the stations and album view, letting you play albums, songs (eight million of ‘em), and playlists at will–either by streaming them or caching them to your device for offline listening.

The new features are part of a tier of service called Slacker Premium Radio, which costs $9.99 a month, the going rate for on-demand music. You can get a free month of service by going here. As before, there’s a free version that’s highly enjoyable if all you want to do is listen to radio-style music, including custom stations; and Slacker Radio Plus, a $3.99/month variant which eliminates ads, includes lyrics, and lets you cache music and skip past songs an unlimited number of times. (Premium Radio has all of Plus’s features.)

The iPad app is particularly cool–as far as I know, Slacker is the first major music service that’s bothered to build an version that takes advantage of the tablet’s copious real estate. The program looks great, and its multi-pane design makes it easier to browse around than it is on a phone; it’s way more pleasant than dealing with an iPhone app in 2X mode. (Slacker’s iOS version is a universal app with both iPhone and iPad modes.)

The competition among subscription music services is intense: in recent months, I’ve been partial to Rdio, in part it lets you cache music to your phone from the browser interface, has a feature that unlocks songs for streaming if you own them in MP3 form, and has a desktop app–all features which Slacker lacks. But Slacker’s belated entry into the market is nicely done overall. It’s particularly good news for BlackBerry users (who have skimpier music offerings than iOS and Android types), iPad owners, and people who are already fans of Slacker’s approach to Internet radio and want one place to go for music listening.

The latest victims are single-station radio players, according to a developer who builds and submits these apps to order. Jim Barcus, owner of DJB Radio Apps, claims that Apple recently rejected 10 of his radio apps, on the grounds that they’re essentially spam and are no different than generic fart apps. He even appealed to Steve Jobs, who reportedly wrote back, “Sorry, but we’ve made our decision.”

I understand why Apple would want to cut off the flow of radio station apps. A city can have a dozen stations, and accepting every submission would crowd the App Store’s “music” section with a whole lot of audio feeds that very few people care about. I’ve noticed this myself when searching for music apps.

But hopefully Apple’s policy isn’t as ham-fisted as Barcus describes. Popular radio stations in major markets probably deserve a pass, especially if they add unique features beyond simple audio streams. I wouldn’t mind if local concert listings, song request forms, built-in alarm clocks and iTunes purchase links became prerequisites for App Store acceptance.

Barcus’ apps are much more generic. Although they allow you to request songs by e-mail, they don’t have any other advanced features and are virtually indistinguishable from one another. These apps could be bumping up against Apple’s anti-cookie cutter policy, which is meant to cut off websites from submitting glorified feed readers to the app store. Glorified audio feeds shouldn’t be allowed either, but a good radio station with great features needn’t be rejected outright.

At long last, Slacker Radio 2.0 for iPhone is nearly here! Of course, the most notable and eagerly anticipated feature is the ability to cache stations for offline playback. Slacker’s updated app was submitted to Apple for review yesterday and, barring any show stoppers, should be available in iTunes in the next day or so.

Slacker 2.0 enables one to cache 25 stations, although it’s not yet clear to me how much music or disk space  (approximately) we’re talking about. I’ve only been in possession of the app about 12 hours, but I suspect I’d have more than enough content to cover my flights to and from Buffalo last weekend. Yet, will it get me through an 8 hour work day (from a perpetual AT&T dead zone)? We’re about to find out…

I didn’t precisely time the initial load, but over WiFi it took about 15 or 20 minutes to cache 6 stations. Given the iPhone’s background app limitations, there’s no scheduled station refreshes as seen on Android — so it’s a manually initiated process. Although the Slacker app will warn you when your cached content is running low.

It should come as no surprise that a killer feature like offline playback wouldn’t be part of Slacker’s freebie service. And indeed, station caching, along with unlimited skips and commercial-free music, is part of the Slacker Radio Plus package which runs $4/month. Which is really a no-brainer in my mind – and something I gladly pre-paid for a year of service a couple months back. However, the continued lack of Slacker on Sonos combined with Rhapsody’s recently lowered rates and offline caching has me playing the field.

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

The station is “finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates,” Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told TechCrunch today. SoundExchange, which collects royalties for rights holders, agreed to a 40 percent to 50 percent reduction in per-song-per-listener rates in exchange for 25 percent of Pandora’s revenue, through 2015.

Notably, that deal is good for other Internet radio stations, so Last.fm and Slacker could also benefit from the agreement.

Some users will end up paying for this change. Anyone who listens to Pandora for more than 40 hours in a given month — that’s roughly a tenth of the user base, says TechCrunch — will have to pay $0.99 cents to keep listening. The premium Pandora One service won’t be subject to the additional charge.

Given that Pandora can get a little repetitive after extended listening, the 40-hour cap is a small concession to make, and even then, a dollar ain’t much. Besides, my sense from other Pandora users is that they’re so enthralled with the concept that tiny trade-offs don’t bother them. Little reminders to click on the player window and an occasional ad are minor inconveniences, well-traded for a virtual DJ that knows all about your musical preferences.

Sirius XM Premium Online is free to download, however it requires a premium subscription to listen. For current Sirius XM customers, that means a $2.99/month extra fee — for non subscribers, that’s $12.99/month.

Regardless, its now the 7th most downloaded app overall, and #1 in the Music category. Lord knows if people are actually shelling out the $13 bucks for the service (I know I wouldn’t), but it’s a respectable showing.

This was surprisingly difficult, which one reason why I’ve dawdled as long as I have. My car is a 2004 Mazda3, dating from an era in which cars didn’t come with iPhone integration and even mundane AUX ports were rare. (I did pay extra for a six-CD changer…which I ended up using maybe four times.) I went through an array of wireless FM transmitters for both my various iPods and my various satellite radios, and even the best ones were staticky hassles. I also spent more than $100 and a considerable amount of time on a fancy-schmancy kit that connected my iPod to my Mazda stereo system–it sounded greated, but caused the iPod to have some sort of digital nervous breakdown that rendered it unusable.

Eventually, I gave up on the iPod front and ended up installing something called an FM Direct for my XM radio–an FM modulator that connects directly to the car’s antenna so it can overpower real radio stations. If I were an audiophile I might be disgruntled with the sound quality, but it’s not bad, and never crackles.

When I decided to get serious about hooking my iPhone up to the Mazda sound system, I visited a local car stereo shop. The owner looked doubtful about the proposition, but eventually recommended a $225 setup. Which he warned me involved the wrong type of cables (I’d need a converter) and would not charge my phone. I thanked him and said I thought I’d do some more research.

I ended up with a $90 device from iSimple which is, essentially, a more elaborate version of the FM Direct box. It’s got a Dock Connector cable that charges the phone and pumps sound to the speakers via a wired FM modulator, and sounds pretty good. I’m not sure why my iPhone keeps asking me if I want to divert its display to a TV–sounds dangerous!–but I’m happy. And I left the FM Direct in for the time being, letting me listen to the phone or the XM receiver.

While I was having the iSimple installed, I checked out pricey car mounts–ones that sit it in a cupholder, ones that fasten to air vents, and ones that stick to the windshield. Then I realized that I could lean the iPhone against the car’s ashtray lid, behind the shifter. It looks like it belongs there, seems reasonably secure, and is easy to remove when I exit the vehicle. Cost: $0.

Next, I started driving around and listening to the iPhone, and I gained new appreciation for the Audiovox Xpress satellite radio I’ve been using (which, actually, I liked all along). The Xpress displays song titles and other info in big type and has buttons I could find with my eyes closed–not that I’d try while driving. The iPhone 3GS, as amazing as it is…isn’t a car radio. I’m excited about having the phone’s iPod features, Pandora, Slacker, AOL Radio, MLB AtBat, and various other audio apps all on one device, but none of them are designed to be used while driving. Sirius XM’s own iPhone app, which replicates only part of the satellite service, clearly isn’t meant for use as a substitute for an in-car XM receiver. And the iPhone’s hardware has issues, too-the screen auto-dims even when the phone’s plugged into power, for instance.

I did pay $3.99 for an app called Tunin.fm that says it’s specifically designed for use in the car. But I shoulda listened to the reviews–despite claiming that it’s designed to work well over iffy data connections, Tunin.fm spends more time losing its place and buffering than any other iPhone music app I’ve encountered. And the interface, while more car-friendly than most, still isn’t something I’d want to use at 60mph.

What would be neat would be a remote control that worked in all of the iPhone’s music-related apps, so I could cycle through stations or songs without ever touching the thing. Apple makes a clever piece of software that lets an iPhone replace the company’s little white remote, but there’s no way to use the little white remote with an iPhone. And this doesn’t look like what I need, either.

I need to give this experiment more time before I make any rash decisions, and I will. I may dump XM; I might use both it and the iPhone in the car; a Twitterfriend suggests that calling to dump XM might get me a steep discount. Any other thoughts or advice?

I listened to the Newcastle, Australia police struggling with a jaywalker and then handling a robbery attempt; later heard the Thurston County, WA police nab a parole violator; and finally downloaded a clip from a recent pursuit of a guy shooting at a Snohomish County, Washington, sheriff deputy.

Fascinating stuff, indeed.

Some of the links will lead you to sites where you can listen to scanners across the nation (and even overseas). For instance, the Icecast Directory lists about 100 scanner sites all over the United States. Choose a scanner and click on the “M3U” link to listen in Windows Media Player. Dig around and you’ll be able to listen to the Irvine, California fire department, San Bernardino County Sheriff, or the Houston, Texas police.

ScanAmerica offers a map of the U.S. Click on a state and work your way through the assorted counties and cities with online scanners. I was able to find the Flathead County’s sheriff and fire in Kalispell, Wyoming. You can also try the Snohomish County, Washington emergency services fire and police scanner Web page.

The Incident Broadcast Network does a good job of helping novices figure out how to listen to scanner broadcasts. When you get to the site, you’ll immediately hear a scanner; the broadcast changes daily. I heard the Thurston County, Washington feed. (Turn it off by clicking the Pause button on the player in the upper left “Welcome to IBN” box.) The site also has clips from some of the more exciting feeds you can download, such as the Monroe, Washington Pursuit with Shots Fired or a San Diego, California Foot Pursuit.

RadioReference.com has a listing of foreign scanning Web sites. It’s where I found Newcastle, Australia (not very active, but a hoot when it was broadcasting; I couldn’t understand half of it…).

Don’t get rattled when you encounter the gyrations you may have to go through to listen to some of these feeds. One site may make it easy by having a player right on the site; other feeds will automatically open Windows Media Player. Police-Scanner, a very good site, requires that you click Control-U in Windows Media Player and copy and paste in the scanner’s link. And don’t be surprised if some feeds are inactive, or limit the number of people logged on at any one time.

In a future story, I’ll pick up where I left off, with tech tips for hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, and other disasters. In the meantime, I’ve gotta go. There’s a cat in a tree in East Yuhupitz, Montana and the fire department’s rolling.

[This post is excerpted from Steve's TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up--it's delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it's free.]

Slacker on the iPhone is very much like Slacker on the Web: You can listen to 100+ genre stations for free, search for artists and then listen to stations that feature them and other performers similar in style, and tweak streaming stations to provide more better-known songs or more obscurities, more newer songs or more older ones, and so forth. A Cover Flow-style interface lets you skip ahead to future songs in your playlist, and you can read about albums and artists, and hop over to the iTunes Store to buy songs you hear and like.  It’s all very easy, enjoyable, and addictive.

Unlike Pandora, Slacker doesn’t give you accss to its full suite of station-creation tools from the iPhone: You can’t build a fully-customized station on the iPhone. (You can, however, listen to ones you created on the Web, and do a fair amount of tweaking and music discovery.) I also found a few minor quirks: If you’re logged into Slacker on the Web and try to connect on your iPhone, the iPhone app rejects your password when it really should tell you that you can only be logged in at one place at a time.  And when I created a station by searching for an artist or song, the fine-tuning screen was there but the controls that should have been on it were missing.

Slacker’s free version is in theory an ad-supported service, although I’ve listened quite a bit and have only heard a couple of commercials so far; for $3.99 a month, you can get Slackr Radio Plus service, which is ad-free and lets you skip an unlimited number of songs. (The free service only lets you skip ahead by a max of six songs on any given station during a 60-minute interval.)

Slacker for the iPhone also lacks the company’s own player’s ability to cache songs so you can listen when you don’t have an Internet connection–a feature which the new BlackBerry app does have.  On the iPhone, Slacker is just a streaming music service. But it’s an impressive one. And with so much music and other radio programming available for free on my iPhone, I’m spending more and more time wondering why I’m paying for XM satellite radio…at least during the baseball off-season.

Herewith, some self-explanatory screens from Slacker for the iPhone:

The radio piggybacks on your 3G phone’s Internet connection via Bluetooth and provides access to both Internet stations chosen by Torian for the MiRoamer service and ones you add yourself, if you choose; it also serves as a hands-free calling system. It’s due for release in the second half of this year; the price will be in the $300-$400 range.

I’d want to take the radio for a test spin before forming any firm conclusions about it, and am particularly curious about how seamless the phone-radio connection is. (Me, I leave Bluetooth turned off except when I’m using it; I’d have to remember to switch it back on to make the MiRoamer work.)

Side note: The MiRoamer booth had a large display playing a promotion presentation in a continuous loop. I was confused why it seemed to keep claiming that the radio offered “surpassed sound quality” until I figured out that the video was getting cut off at the edges…