Slacker.com Review: DIY Online Radio Stations for Every Mood

Now I can take my fine-tuned station with me with the Slacker G2 Personal Radio Player – Yesss!

So I’m sitting in the home office, doing some work and I think to myself – “this place needs some music”. The problem I have is not only that I wanted music, I wanted my unique genres and artists, I wanted an online source – not a bunch of mp3s I’ve gotta make playlists for, I wanted to be able to use it on both my mac or my PC, I wanted it all.

Slacker.com is what I found. I’ve seen the light! Well, for the most part.

Here’s the deal, slacker.com allows users to sign-up for an account for free. Free accounts in the beginning were only limited by # of skips a user had to cycle through music. Quick tip: If you use the service and a song comes on that you hate, don’t use a skip, use the BAN* song feature. It’ll save your skips for songs you might not want to hear right now, but possibly later. Now Free accounts also get to listen to crappy commercials between songs. It doesn’t happen often, every 25 or so songs, but it’s still a bummer.

This is what I did, I signed up, created a few stations for my moods. I have a station for my speedmetal/industrial mood & another for my country mood. Ok, no I don’t – but if I wanted to I could. The service is founded on the principal of users choosing the music they like and listening to it. Simple. With every account Free or Paid, you’re able to ban artists, mark favorites, adjust settings like artist discovery or “just hits”, giving every user lots of control over their station.

More tips: (if you signup)

• If you like a song, use the favorite button to tell slacker.com, the favorites help not only in the frequency for that song, but also the artist, genre and similar bands out there slacker will recommend to you in the artist discovery section.

• Make your own station, listening to the presets is fine… but with the tools all accounts get you’re able to tell slacker exactly what artists you like, making the station truly your own.

• Share! Once you’re confident in your artist selection and ratings (something established over time) let others hear your station and share it through slacker.

• Download the desktop version… If you are a PC user (windows), slacker has made a software player available in their support/download section of the site. All the tools from the site in a simple, media player-esqe application.

• Browse the “options” & “edit station” features of slacker. Go through every tab and try the features for yourself. It will make your station better, sooner.

• If you really hate what you’re hearing, BAN can also be used for the whole artists library – all their music goes byebye, never to be heard again! I love this feature… in the beginning, as my station was taking form, I was only banning songs… after noticing I really hated everything from the same artists over and over again, the BAN artist feature became my best friend.

News from slacker… Now they’ve gone wireless.

If you make a station you’d like to take with you, without taking your laptop, the new Slacker G2 player does everything the website does and you can take it with you! Fabulous!

Slacker.com Quick Review:

Purchased: I didn’t since Slacker.com is a free service. There is a premium upgrade and you can also purchase the G2 portable radio player in different storage capacities.

Slacker.com Benefits:

• Lots of control over music

• Free & Paid subscriptions
• You’re not purchasing music, you’re selecting music preferences

Slacker.com Drawbacks:

• Free service limits, advertising

• No software player for Mac

The Mr. gives slacker.com 4/5 – Everyone hates radio commercials and that’s the only reason I gave it a 4 instead of a 5. When the service started there were no commercials even on the free version, but the free version now has commercials. That’s what I get for being cheap, but even with commercials I still use slacker.com all the time. The paid version has more features without the commercials so I would likely give the paid service a 5/5.