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SLACKER.COM

Well for those who do not know, Slacker launched Slacker Premium and updated their play interface and functionality. I was hoping this would be a great update, but I can't say that without lying.

Slacker Premium is a major disappointment compared to MOG and Rhapsody. No Library, small max playlist sizes. Building a playlist takes a lot of time and can be aggravating when you find out it loses songs you added. The whole interface is complicated and not user friendly. It is not laid out nicely and cannot be sorted well. It takes so much time to build a playlist that a person would be better off ripping the songs from a CD (ok slight exaggeration, but not much.)

As I have read on the Slacker forum, the whole player is unstable and I can confirm it. Songs skipping, skipping last 20 sec, completely locking up, playing two songs at once, incorrect album art and sometimes incorrect songs altogether. I use Slacker 4-8 hours a day on average, so this gets aggravating.

But... that is not what upsets me the most. So premium sucks. I don't have to subscribe. The player sucks, but it always has. But they messed up Slacker Plus. They took away our ability to add individual song requests without adding an entire artist. Now to add a song we want, we have to take the more time-consuming route of adding the artist first, which throws in an extra seed artist and messes up our stations. I have no idea what they were thinking, but the update is just plain bad. The entire forum community is irate and Slacker is not doing a thing about it.
 
Yep, agree! As a fan (for who knows how much longer) of Slacker, I've gotta say these latest changes are bad. The old layout was much more user-friendly. I had the perfect stations with no seed artists and big playlists, now, as was mentioned, you have to add artists to add songs and that forces me to hear songs I don't like and to have to hit the "ban" button frequently! Hope they get it right before I cancel and leave for good.
 
3+ months since the last post and "so far, so bad".

Not only has none of the previously mentioned stuff been fixed, but lately my iPhone version of the player crashes all the time. Add me to the list of those who have no reason to reward them by continuing my subscription. Unfortunately things have gotten really awful.
 
Well they have fixed most of the stability issues on the web player. Nothing else has really changed. More like I have decided to put-up with it.

I do feel they need to improve, but I think I will continue my subscription when the time comes up. There is simply not a service that I find any better to replace it with. I have not found a single service with as many songs, quality pre-built stations, nor customization for custom stations. On demand services like MOG and Rhapsody are good, and I subscribe to one of them, but they simply are not good enough at radio-like features.

I am trying Iheartradio beta right now. I have mixed feelings on it. It has played karaoke songss in place of original tracks, and lacks powerful customization. It has however, been fairly accurate thus far and I love how nicely they integrated in real stations. I still don't see it as a replacement to Slacker.
 
The cool thing is I've finally figured out how I can, post changes, still utilize the service for maximum enjoyment, so I've been sticking around (also glad they have finally fixed issues with song streaming).
 
We were about to go with Slacker when they discontinued their hardware a couple years back.
We prefer dedicated equipment, and really, it was the one thing none of the competition offered.
 
I've made it a point to listen to Slacker quite a bit over the past week. On my iPhone as well as on a couple of different computers. I do have to say that it does seem more stable...although it still hiccups for me from time to time.

I like that Slacker has better audio quality and a bigger, deeper music library than Pandora. While I still find managing some of its features a little awkward, if they can give me an essentially bug-free experience I'll use it more often.
 
Slacker has now added ESPN content. From the sounds of it, 1 station is free for all while the other two are available to subscribers and are supposedly customizable.

I personally am not a ESPN fan, so I will never use it. However, it is nice to see Slacker staying innovative and ahead of the other pureplay companies.
 
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