Slacker Personal Radio is a free internet music service. Although the company has existed for some time now I had never tried their service. Unlike Pandora, Slacker lacked the media attention and since none of my friends were users of the service or their devices neither was I. This all changed when I acquired a Slacker Portable 4GB G1 player in a woot-off.

Before discussing the Slacker Portable I’ll discuss the service. Slacker, like Pandora, allows users to create custom stations based on their favorite artists and genres, easily naming it with any title desired. Once created users are able to control control station content. Slacker automatically generates an extensive list of artist that are related to the genre or initial artist selection. Users can rate their preferred artists as favorites or even rate individual songs. Don’t like a song or artist? Then ban either from the station. All of this information is used to generate the stations play-list which in my case was precisely what i wanted played. Not the type of person who wants to create a custom station? Then select one from an extensive list of predetermined stations. Like twitter or blogging? By clicking the “Share Station” button on the player you can quickly post a link to the station you’re listening to – to a linked twitter account, share the link with friends via email, or embed a flash player for that station on a website (sure to be popular with bloggers). Software players are available for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android smart-phones in addition to a software player for desktops and the flash player available on the slacker website. The service is available in two flavors, free and subscription based.The free service forces you to listen to occasional commercials and limits the ability to skip songs to 6 skips per month. The subscription service offers no commercials and unlimited song skips. Thus far I have been using the free service and haven’t found the commercials to be too intrusive. For a sample of embedded content, featuring two custom stations I created, see the players below.

Schiff – Indie Rock Super Stars — featuring artists like The National, Arcade Fire, Cold War Kids, Feist, and more…

Schiff – Dance/Trance/Electronica — Featuring music from artist like Tiesto, Armin Van Buuren, Markus Schulz and more…

Schiff – Straight up Gangsta — Featuring music from the greatest 90′s hop hop artists…

Slacker Portable is a portable hardware player for Slacker Personal Radio. The cool thing about the portable player is that it caches music streams utilizing a WiFi connection, providing hours of untethered music enjoyment. Available in 25 and 40 station models, the portable player gets linked to your Slacker account via the Slacker website, and then content is customized using the “Devices” tab on the Slacker flash player or desktop software player. Users are able to add custom or predetermined stations to their player and once connected to WiFi the portable player will begin caching streams. Linking the device to a slacker account is as easy as entering the portable device id on the Slacker website. I was able to add stations within minutes and connecting the portable player to my local WiFi connection secured with WPA2 authentication was a breeze. Once I began listening to the device I was immediately impressed by the audio quality. Another nice surprise was how nice the screen looked. Although the importance of a high-quality screen on a device like this is debatable the device does provide album information and a brief artist biography for the song being played. The screen will be important for anyone interested in this information.

The device is an absolute fingerprint magnet so get used to wiping it down on a regular basis. Synchronizing, or as Slacker refers to it — Refreshing, takes several hours and will become a lengthy and painful process for many. The impact of a refresh can be minimized by running it overnight. I will update this post with information on how subsequent refreshes are handled. My hope is that only content that has been played is refreshed. This would dramatically reduce the amount of time to refresh the device since most users will not listen to 100% of the content downloaded in-between refreshes. When refreshing stations that are already on the device, refresh time is greatly reduced — taking only a few minutes per station. Refresh times are directly influenced by how many songs you ban or mark as favorites. First generation hardware, the Slacker Portable G1, has some issues with refreshing stations. While most of the problems seem to be repaired in the most recent firmware version, problems will continue on devices that were upgraded from firmware versions which had issues. This can be solved by performing a “recovery” of the unit, which can be compared to formatting and reinstalling an operating system, after which stations will refresh without issue. Second generation hardware, the Slacker Portable G2, seems to refresh stations without issue. For more information on how to perform a restore of Slacker Portable hardware see this post. Unfortunately both versions of the hardware have now been discontinued by Slacker and while they plan to continue supporting existing hardware, it’s availability is reduced to remaining stock only. The G2 can currently be purchased directly from Slacker for $129 with a free home dock. If you’ve been on the fence about buying one of these players this is your last chance (and at a great price too)!

Slacker Personal Radio’s future lies in the booming smart-phone market. Slacker’s smart-phone applications are a great option for many and since the proprietary hardware has been discontinued they will soon be the only option for those seeking portable Slacker radio. Slacker for Android, Blackberry, and Palm WebOS all support native station caching. The iPhone player does not support caching, however slacker announced an iPhone version with station caching at the 2010 CES. Slacker reports the update will be available in 2010 through the app store. All four versions work well over WiFi and 3G but offer vastly superior sound quality over WiFi. Caching stations does require a significant amount of storage space so leep that in mind when deciding what capacity phone to purchase.

Slacker Personal Radio is an excellent product. Slacker seems to have a sustainable business model which is supported by advertising, subscription packages, and hardware sales. Streams are excellent quality and users who would like to create custom stations are afforded a significant amount of control over station content. The service is widely available with players available on most mainstream smart-phones and all desktop computers (via the flash player). Slacker Portable is an interesting take on portable music. It’s great being able to take “internet radio” with you — even when an internet connection isn’t available (think commuting, vacationing, long road trips, etc.). The portable devices are visually appealing and highly functional however they suffer from one glaring issue — the amount of time required to download content. It is the single most detracting quality of the device. On the positive side many people can time refreshes to run overnight, while charging, decreasing the inconvenience of the lengthy process. For internet users with a bandwidth cap imposed by their ISP the shear amount of data being downloaded may be a deal breaker. It will be interesting to see how the Slacker smart-phone software players evolve. With the discontinuation of the proprietary hardware players it will soon be one of the only ways to take it with you.