Newest version of Slacker (finally) brings cached music to the iPhone

by Scott Carmichael on

This afternoon, Apple gave approval to the newest version of the Slacker personal radio app for the iPhone. We’ve been following Slacker for some time now, and (personally) I find them to offer one of the best streaming music services on the market. Their stations offer a fantastic lineup of tunes, and their mobile applications are available for most platforms.

As an Android user, I’ve had the luxury of cached stations for some time now, but iPhone users can finally join the fun, and download cached stations to their device. With this new feature, the app can store a decent amount of music directly to your phone, without the need for connectivity.

This is of course perfect if you are traveling, and don’t want to pay through the nose for international data. The new version is also perfectly timed for the upcoming changes to AT&T data plans.

You’ll find the newest version of Slacker in the App Store. To enjoy the cached stations feature, you’ll need to upgrade to Slacker Plus, which starts at just $3.99/month.

Get yourself in the holiday spirit with Slacker iPhone Holiday Radio

by Scott Carmichael on

In need of some cheering up this holiday season? Slacker just released a free Christmas version of their popular iPhone/iPod Touch streaming music app.

The Holiday version includes 11 festive channels, including “Dysfunctional Holiday” and several channels to cater for your personal taste in music.

As with the regular Slacker player, this one is free of charge. When you upgrade to Slacker Plus, you remove the ads from inside the app, and add the ability to skip more than 6 times per hour.

Still, even without the plus upgrade, this app is a fun and free way to get your daily fix of Christmas music. Thankfully the app also allows you to “ban” certain songs, which is exactly what I’ll do when “Last Christmas” pops up in my playlist.

You’ll find Slacker iPhone Holiday Radio in the App Store under “Slacker Holiday”, or by clicking this link (iTunes URL)

Slacker Personal Radio comes to Android

by Scott Carmichael on

This has been a pretty big week for Android fans. Verizon Wireless became the third US operator to hop on board the Android bandwagon, and did so with not one, but two different Android devices.

The Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris are bother very impressive phones. Of course, a good smartphone becomes a great smartphone when developers create high quality applications for the platform.

One of those apps to be released this week is the Slacker Personal Radio player. It appeared in the Android market on Thursday, and is free of charge.

Using the app is free as well – though if you want to remove ads and add the ability to skip more than 6 tracks an hour, you’ll want to consider upgrading to Slacker Radio Plus (starting at just $3.99/month).

The app mimics the Slacker browser interface nicely, and you get the same favorite/block controls that give you full control over your music preferences.

I found the time to load tracks a bit on the long side, even when on 3G, and unlike on the Blackberry Slacker version, no tracks are cached to the memory card, so you will always need to be in range of WiFi or a cell signal to use Slacker. And, unlike on the iPhone, Slacker runs nicely in the background, and even shows your current track in the Android dropdown notification bar.

Tweet your Slacker music discovery experiences

by Scott Carmichael on

Regular readers will no doubt know that Slacker is one of my personal favorites in the busy world of online music services.

Since I first wrote about Slacker, they have added an iPhone and Blackberry player to their lineup.

Starting tonight, Slacker users will be able to share their music experience by sending a variety of stuff to Twitter. The list of Tweetable (is that even a word?) options is:

  • Station changes/plays
  • Favorite Song
  • Banned Song
  • Banned Artist

So, next time you come across a song you really love (or hate), Slacker will share it with all your devoted Twitter followers. There are some other Twitter-sharing music services out there, but the Slacker integration sounds really easy to use.

If you’d like to set up your Slacker/Twitter integration, head on over to the Slacker Community page (live tonight at 9pm EST). In the meantime, why not head on over to Twitter and follow us!

Slacker radio comes to every Verizon Blackberry Storm

by Scott Carmichael on

Here at Gadling, we’ve been huge Slacker fans for ages – their personal radio player even won a spot in our top 25 travel gadgets of 2008.

Apparently we were not the only ones to notice the power of Slacker, because Verizon Wireless just announced that they would “push” the Slacker player to every single Blackberry Storm. This means millions of Storm owners will have access to the awesome radio channels in the Slacker lineup, as well as the ability to create their own personalized channel.

The Slacker player for the Blackberry Storm even lets users purchase tracks from the V Cast Music store. One of the most powerful features of Slacker for the Blackberry is the ability to cache music to the storage card, which means listeners won’t be without music when they are outside the coverage area. Of course, since Verizon offers the largest 3G network in the nation, this means you’ll need to be on a plane or in a tunnel to take advantage of cached streaming!

Expect to see the Slacker player icon show up on your Blackberry Storm in the next couple of days, but you can of course already take advantage of the service by heading to Slacker.com and checking it out in your browser.