Finding the Rhythm

In a recent blog posting, I mentioned that the once-underwhelming Pandora music service—still was.

Truth be told, if I’m going to listen to Internet radio, I’m apt to tune-in to iDanceRadio.fm. I’m the program director, as most readers of this blog know, and I like to make sure things are working musically, technically, and check for songs that probably are ready to be retired from rotation, played more or played less, and so on. Basically, it’s the classic eating of one’s own dog food.

The vast majority of the time, I listen to iDanceRadio.fm on my BlackBerry smartphone, using BerryTunes, an horrifically overpriced, absolutely butt-ugly, and in some ways badly implemented media player for us CrackBerry users. If there was anything better, I’d use it, but there’s not… It’s the only BlackBerry software I know of that plays streaming Internet radio. Considering there are at least half a dozen such apps for the Apple iPhone, ranging in price from free to about $5, I sense an opportunity for a CrackBerry programmer, but BerryTunes, for all its myriad faults mostly works most of the time, and it is pretty cool to take my Internet radio with me on my long (~75 minutes each way) commute. And most of the time, as long as Sprint’s network is cooperating, I tune-in at home, and there’s no interruption the entire journey. Very geek cool.

So, streaming media on the BlackBerry is, as Martha says, a Very Good Thing. (Does she still say that after spending all that time in jail?) It’s what drove me to try Pandora again (their BlackBerry app), and it’s what drove me to try out Slacker.

Slacker Personal Radio, like Pandora, offers user-customized “radio.” Unlike Pandora, they dispense with the novel “music genome” stuff, and instead take a more satellite radio like approach, with 100 or so professionally-programmed (I’ll comment on that in a moment) stations to get you started. You can make your own from scratch, or start with one of theirs, and tinker with it.

Like Pandora, you listen online on your PC, or on your iPhone or BlackBerry. But what’s unusual about Slacker for BlackBerry is that their system allows “caching” of stations. When you hook-up your CrackBerry to your PC to sync, a small software shim runs that loads-up your memory card with about an hour or so of each cached station’s content. Every time you sync, it’s refreshed with more content. When you play a cached station, it pulls the content from the cache—not using any mobile data bandwidth at all. If it runs out of cached content, or the station you want to hear isn’t cached, it streams it live over your data connection.

The live streaming works quite well; they’ve obviously figured out how to make it as resilient as possible to the occasional burps that occur with mobile data (the makers of BerryTunes could learn a thing or two there). If you lose your data connection temporarily, it’ll restart by itself as soon as it has a connection again. (Of course, if cached content is playing, you don’t even need a cellular signal.)

Slacker has the technology down, to be sure. But like Pandora, the programming, while much better than Pandora, still leaves a lot to be desired for dance enthusiasts. Kudos to Slacker for creating a lot to choose from in dance/electronic (I’d have to look again, but it’s about 10 channels wide), but the most logical choice for me, their Club Hits channel, leaves much to be desired. It’s as though they play the songs you might hear in a club, but the mixes of those songs are frequently the worst sounding and least clubby of the available mixes for a song, as if they were just chosen at random.

In fairness, Slacker’s ability to ban artists or songs from a channel, and to mark favorites, allows one to customize the station to one’s liking. All those bad mix choices? I can make sure I never hear them ever, ever again. So if an interactive experience is what you want, then Slacker delivers. But I have to wonder: If you need or want to customize a “radio station” to that extent, would you not just pull out your iPod and play all your own music?

In closing, I have to say that I’ve actually thoroughly enjoyed Slacker’s Explicit Comedy channel. With a nice blend of classic material and the very latest comedy releases, if you like irreverent comedy like I do, it’s worth listening to. And with Slacker’s ban and favorite capabilities, you can always mark the crap you don’t like, and you’ll never hear it again.

But for dance music? I think I’ll stick with my iPod, or BerryTunes streaming iDanceRadio.fm.