Slacker Radio

Slacker Radio just keeps getting better. The thirteen-million song strong service still offers an oh-so-sweet mix of customizable, curated channels, playlists, news and sports talk, and on-demand streaming, but adds a recent redesign, the information-filled Music Guide, and content from The Weather Channel. Slacker continues its forward push to become your all-inclusive streaming audio service.

A Softer Interface
The recently revamped Slacker ditches the slick, black design that's been the service's face since its 2007 debut for a mostly white page that's interspersed with a soft blue. Although Slacker now looks like it could be "baby's first streaming music service," there are benefits to the new design. If, like me, you spend the majority of your day staring into the white void that is Microsoft Word, glancing over to a white Slacker is easier on the eye than the black one.

The tabbed area that contained the "Home," "Now Playing," "Create Your Own," and "Devices" sections are no more. Slacker has a new panel-driven interface that features large, square icons that make identifying items far simpler. The upper-most section that houses album art, song title, and playback controls crib elements from the Slacker Apple iPad?app's original design. The area is larger and easier to read, but it has a few issues. The volume control is positioned a bit too close to the "Up Next" preview square that lets you take a peek at an upcoming track. I'd sometimes preview instead of adjusting the volume as a result.

On the upside, I like that you can view artist info or lyrics by clicking the artist name or song title, respectively, but that requires some exploration to find. Unlike Slacker's previous design, the new build lacks an identifying icon.

Customization and Discovery
Slacker Radio has three main areas: "Slacker Stations," "Music Guide," and "My Music." Visiting/logging into Slacker takes you to Music Guide by default?don't worry, you can still play tunes there. Music Guide is an information hub that fills you in on the latest music happenings and points you toward cool content. For example, Prince?at the time of this writing?was the Artist of the Week due to The Purple One turning 55 years old. Slacker created a channel that not only highlighted his rich music offerings, but those who inspired him as well.

Slacker Stations houses the services many news, talk, comedy, and music channels and displays them as large panels with eye-catching art design. There are over 40 top-level (including Alternative, Blues, Chill, Comedy) and multiple sub-genres within each. You can, of course, key in an artist name or song title into the search engine. Typing "Hendrix" and then clicking the search icon returned numerous results, but I liked that I could filter by artists, album, song, or station by clicking a tab to the right of the results.

My Music is where you'll find your playlists, custom stations, and recently played stations. The playlists and custom stations areas have large, hard to miss icons that let you build fresh playlists and custom stations. A diagram displays how you go about build either when you click the respective icons.

I fine-tuned my "The Wind Cries Mary" channel by clicking the "Fine Tune" icon, which is now located in the same area as the playback controls (the old Slacker design buried it in the settings menu). The fine tune options include a keyword stream that displays an artist's most popular songs and their relative number of songs based on the popularity and size of the keyword (color represents popularity and size represents number). Like the SiriusXM MySXM beta I recently tested, Slacker Radio has sliders that you can use to tweak playback metrics in the related artists, favorite songs, popular songs, and new/older song categories. Unlike SiriusXM MySXM, Slacker's sliders remained the same from station to station. Still, the additional customization options open the door to more tightly crafted custom stations.

As always, clicking the "Ban" icon prevents a song/artist from appearing. Clicking the heart-shaped "Favorite" icon, however, gave a song extra weight, causing Slacker to play it more frequently. You can also turn on/off Slackers DJ, ABC News, and ESPN updates.

Next: Subscriptions, Music Quality, and More

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/Xubw__WG_wI/0,2817,2340016,00.asp

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