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.

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. And if you think you’re interested, you might want to sign up for the premium service before the upgrade rolls out. It’s only $89.99 for a year now, and you should get grandfathered in at a discount of $2.49 per month for the rest of your contract once the upgrade goes live.

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

(When you tell Slacker to cache, it advises you to do so over 3G only if you’ve got an unlimited data plan–that alert will take on new meaning once there are iPhone users who don’t have unlimited data.)

Missing, at least for now, is the automated night-time caching feature that’s available on Slacker’s Android and BlackBerry versions. Maybe Slacker will add it once iPhone OS 4 is out and it can make the downloading happen in the background.

Dave Zatz liked this feature when he tried it a couple of weeks ago, and I do, too. It’s a point in favor of Slacker’s $4.99 a month Plus service; you can try it out for two weeks for free. After the jump, some screenshots.

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 Sonos S5 ($399) was one of my 2009 boxes of the year. With good reason. Sonos is a sophisticated but easy to implement and easy to operate whole-home audio solution. Featuring content from both our local music collections and various online sources. The S5 broke new ground in the Sonos lineup by integrating rich, powerful speakers into their connected receiver. Sonos is not an inexpensive solution (especially since you won’t stop with just one room), but it’s clearly the best at what it does. Yet, what’s next?

A Sonos email survey I received a few days ago alluded to several interesting expansion possibilities. As I still have a loaner unit on hand, I’ve got a few ideas….

1. Downsize
The survey item I snapped above includes an option for a less expensive unit than the S5 that would replace an alarm clock radio. And that was indeed my top selection on this screen. Not so much on the pricing point, but on the size and usage point. The S5 isn’t huge, but it’s physically too big for most night stands. Also, the the sound is too big for, and will wasted in, most bedrooms. So I’d love to see a nightstand model for the bedroom, a form factor which could also be used in the office.

2. Embrace the Android
The iPhone remote control app is quite impressive. Considering all it does, including replacing a dedicated piece of hardware and despite my little UI nav nits. However, there are plenty of folks who don’t own Apple hardware that might appreciate a Sonos app. And at my briefing last fall, Sonos did indicate additional mobile clients could be on tap for 2010. My first choice, given a probable defection from AT&T to the Sprint/Google/HTC Nexus One in the very near future, is Android support.

3. Bring the Slacker
I’ve come to prefer Slacker’s niche programming over Pandora’s acoustic similarities. Which regularly resulted in bizarre, unrelated pairings. I love the Led Zeppelin. But not when I’m in a 90s grunge kind of mood. So I’d like to see some Slacker on Sonos. And, shortly after CES, I put the two companies in touch with hopes of seeing them resolve this shortcoming. As it’s probably the #1 reason I haven’t tricked out every room with a S5. I love Sonos, but content is king. Bring it.

(This item republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

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:

Pandora has done a good job of rallying its legions of fans to support it–I got the following e-mail (after the jump) today from Tim Westergren, the company’s founder:

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora;

Today, thanks to the extraordinary support of many Pandora listeners, we took a giant step forward when the House of Representatives supported Pandora and Internet radio and passed the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008.  Now we need your help so that the Senate will pass it also – and quickly… The finish line is in sight!

After a yearlong negotiation, Pandora, SoundExchange and the RIAA are finally optimistic about reaching an agreement on royalties that would save Pandora and Internet radio.  The legislation would give us the extra time we need to finalize the deal.

Please call your Senators Monday morning starting at 9:00 (Eastern) and ask them to support the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008.

The person who answers the phone in your Senator’s office may ask for the bill number – it’s H.R. 7084 (if they ask for a Senate bill number, you can assure them that in this unusual case, the Senate is actually voting on the House bill number).

Senator Barbara Boxer: (202) 224-3553

Senator Dianne Feinstein: (202) 224-3841

If the phone is busy, please try again until you get through. These calls really do make a difference.

Thanks so much for you ongoing support.

Tim

I don’t pretend to understand the Byzantine world of music rights and licensing. (Side note: When I met with the Slacker folks recently, they told me they’d struck their own deals with music companies and therefore weren’t at risk of being run out of business by the rise in standard licensing fees–I’m not entirely clear on why Pandora couldn’t do something similar.)

But it seems unthinkable that we would end up with licensing costs so high that it’s simply impossible for Web-based radio to work econmically, when licensing fees that online stations could afford would put money in the music industry’s pockets. The folks who own music couldn’t be so pigheaded as to destroy the future of radio, right?

Um, right?

And then there’s Slacker, a service which, like Pandora and Last.fm, lets you conjure up custom radio stations which riff on what you tell it about your favorite artists by creating playlists with both faves and other performers you’ll probably like. Slacker is available in free and fee-based Web versions, but it was built from the ground up to work with portable players. Earlier this year, the company released a Slacker handheld that had plenty of promise but was also kind of bulky and clunky. And then it moved quickly to replace that first version with an improved model: the Slacker G2, which is available from Slacker’s site and Best Buy. I’ve been playing with it and really enjoying having personalized radio I can stick in my pocket. But while the Slacker service is a kick and this second-generation hardware is more polished than its predecessor, the device still feels like it’s a good fit for dedicated radio fans more than for music aficionados of all types.

First a bit about the service: Slacker provides dozens of pre-programmed stations in genres from Today’s Hits to Party Hip Hop to Acid Jazz to Spiritual to Bluegrass to Vocal Standards. There’s something–or several somethings–for almost everybody. But the real fun comes when you program your own station by telling Slacker about the musicians you like, so it can program a station–or multiple stations–tailored precisely to your tastes. You could create a station based on Belle & Sebastian, the Backstreet Boys, Coldplay, Eminen, the Grateful Dead, Burl Ives, Paul McCartney, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Kate Smith, Dionne Warwick, and Young Jeezy. (Hey, I just did!) It would play mostly those artists, plus others with stylistic similarities. (Like, in this case, Britney Spears, Elton John, Ethel Merman, and T.I.) You can choose to publish your stations, so anyone else out there who shares your tastes can listen too.

Fine-tuning options let you opt to skew your channel towards either the familiar or the unexpected. You can favorite songs (in which case you’ll hear them more ) or ban them altogether. Pay for the Premium version of Slacker, and you can request that specific songs be put into rotation on your channels and skip past as many songs as you want while listening (freeloaders can skip only six an hour). And Premium subscribers don’t have to listen to ads, which are pretty minimal even in the free service. It’s a little like traditional radio (you can’t help but discover music you didn’t know about) and a little like standard digital music (you can dive deep into stuff you like in a customizable way) and very well done indeed.

Even if you only listen on a PC or Mac, Slacker is a lot of fun and a formidable rival to better-known music services–its tagline, “Your music without the work,” isn’t hype. But what makes it unique is that it also comes in the form of a portable player that lets you take stations–your own and Slacker’s pre-programmed ones–anywhere. Which is where the Slacker G2 comes in. It’s a smaller, more pocket-friendly device than the first-generation Slacker portable. (In the image below and to the right, that’s the new one on the left and the old one on the right, in roughly correct proportion.) But the basic idea remains the same: You can download stations to its memory via Wi-Fi or USB cable, then hit the road and listen to them without worrying about whether you have Internet access or not. (Two versions are available: A $200 model with 4GB of memory that can hold up to 25 stations consisting up up to 2500 songs, and a $250 one with 8GB of memory, good for up to 40 stations and 4000 songs. Slacker says that the non-removable battery is rated for up to 15 hours of playback, up fron 10 hours with the original portable, which had a replaceable battery.)

In theory at least, the built-in Wi-Fi is what makes the Slacker G2 truly mobile, since it removes the need to attach the device to a computer even to download music. When I connected to a home network, the transfers were easy, once I entered the network’s password. (Which is a bit of a hassle, since you you need to do it by scrolling around an on-screen keyboard with the G2′s thumbwheel, but you should only need to do it once per network.)

When I tried to connect via three public Wi-Fi networks, however, I ran into trouble every time. At a Starbucks, I entered my T-Mobile user login info, and the player wouldn’t connect; actually, the Wi-Fi feature froze until I did a hard reset. (A Slacker representative told me that Starbucks’ Wi-Fi isn’t currently supported–the chain’s in-progress transition from T-Mobile to AT&T causes technical problems.) When I tried to connect at a Courtyard by Marriott hotel with free Wi-Fi when the G2 had slightly less than a full charge, the portable told me to fully charge the battery before connecting. And at a Borders where my laptop instantly found the network, the Slacker didn’t see anything until I did another hard reset. Once I did and logged in, it worked fine.

In fairness, three attempts aren’t enough to come to statistically-significant conclusions about this feature. All in all, though, I think it’s a good idea to try and connect at home if possible rather than assuming that you’ll be able to do so anywhere and everywhere.

The G2′s 240-by-320 color screen is smaller than that of the original Slacker portable, but it makes good use of it, displaying cover art, artist photos and biographies, and other information. The user interface is pretty straightforward, and similar to that of the Web-based Slacker player: There are buttons for backwards and forwards skipping, play/pause, favorite, and ban; volume controls; and a thumbwheel and home button on the side for navigating menus. When subscribers to Slacker’s Premium service favorite a song, they have the option of saving it to the portable’s memory for later, on-demand listening at any time, as long as they continue their subscriptions. (The backwards-skip button only works for songs you’ve saved and for music from your own collection, not for stations.)