Take Slacker on the road this summer with our Slacker car listening giveaway!

by Scott Carmichael on

Staying entertained during a (long) summer roadtrip can be a major hassle – if you rely on broadcast radio, you’ll be forced to find new stations every couple of hours, and if your tunes come from CD’s, you’ll need a large stash of them for the trip.

Thankfully there is a great alternative – with Slacker personal radio. With the latest version of Slacker on your Blackberry, iPhone or Android device, you can customize your own radio station, or pick from one of their own selections. And with the Slacker “cached radio” feature, music is downloaded and stored on your device, which means you can play music for hours without the need for a data connection.

Gadling has teamed up with Slacker to bring you a couple of great prizes – by entering our contest, you can win one of two Slacker car listening packages or one of six three month Slacker Radio Plus subscriptions.

In the car listening package, you get a high-power FM transmitter and a one year subscription to Slacker Radio Plus.

To enter, all you need to do is tell us your favorite road trip destination!

  • To enter, simply leave a comment answering the question posted above.
  • The comment must be left before Monday June 21 2010 at 5:00 PM Eastern Time.
  • You may enter only once.
  • Eight Prize Winners will be randomly selected to receive either one of two Slacker car listening kits (FM transmitter + 1 year Slacker Radio Plus subscription) or one of six three month Slacker Radio Plus subscriptions. (We’ll decide which prize goes to which winner.) A (free) Slacker account is required to enable the Radio Plus subscription.
  • Open to legal residents of the 50 United States, and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
  • The total value of each prize is approximately $87.87 (Car listening kit) or $15 (three month Radio Plus subscription).
  • Click here for the complete official rules of this giveaway.

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)

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.