The Slacker Media Player: Nostalgia (the Good Kind) in the Palm of Your Hand
Kids, I want you to take off your jetpacks, and step out of your flying cars for a minute. Come sit down over here, and let Old Man Wheaton tell you a tale of a time when television didn’t have a pause button, renting videos meant actually going to a store - during hours that they set - and listening to the radio meant hearing the same 27 songs every two and-a-half hours, with ten to eighteen minutes of commercials every 60 minutes.
Now, I realize that some of you think I’m just making this up to scare you, but it’s true. We didn’t have any control over how we got our entertainment back then. We couldn’t skip songs we didn’t like, and we couldn’t tell the radio how frequently it should play certain songs. It was a different time, when nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them and the King of England would just show up at your house and expect you to make him a cup of tea.
Those of you who have grown up in a world where you have unprecedented control over your media (DRM, which is beyond the scope of this story, notwithstanding) may have a hard time believing that we who came before you would actually wait for a song we hated to go away, or sit through loud and obnoxious commercials and DJs because we knew a song we loved was coming up. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true; that’s just how the world worked back then, and we accepted it without question.
Oh, how the times have changed!
The change came to me in 2002, when I got my very first XM Satellite Radio. No longer was I limited to a handful of radio stations that all played the same basic playlist! When I drove out of major media markets, I was able to listen to more than just country and right wing talk radio! There were comedy stations! Old Time Radio stations! Eclectic stations that reached deep into the catalogs of everything from classic rock to jam bands to truly alternative music from the 80s. It was absolutely glorious, and I couldn’t believe that we ever listened to radio any other way. We all thought that it was too good to be true.
Last year, when XM merged with Sirius, we found out that it was too good to be true. Most of the stations I loved on XM, if they stayed on the air after the merger at all, became as repetitive and pedestrian as the ones that drove me away from FM radio so many years ago. It seemed like the programming departments (with a few notable exceptions - the decades remain great, and XMU and XM Chill seem to have been left alone) made the inexplicably stupid decision to simply recreate the unsatisfying FM radio experience that drove so many of us to become XM and Sirius subscribers in the first place. The talk stations are all the same, the DJs are interesting and many of them provide great nostalgic value, but radio is ultimately about listening to music, and what’s the point of paying for satellite, if it doesn’t offer anything substantially different from what we already get with our basic radios?
I recently wrote that years of listening to Pandora and using social news sites like Reddit had conditioned me to expect a greater amount of control over the information and entertainment that I consume. Being able to train a service to give me more of what I want and less of what I don’t isn’t a luxury; it’s a requirement.
One afternoon last December, after hearing “Eyes Without A Face” for the third time in five hours on a station that used to play great New Wave music, I looked at my radio and I said, “I wish I could train you like Pandora, so you’d stop playing this crap I can’t stand and play more of the music I like. What happened to you, man? You used to be cool!”
My iPod, sitting unused on the passenger seat, said, “hey, I’m right here, you know. I have all your favorite music, all ready to go.”
“That’s not the point, iPod,” I said. “I want radio. I grew up with radio. I’ve listened to radio my whole life. Radio is important to me, and you, iPod, are no radio!”
“I also don’t play a lot of music you don’t like, tough guy,” my iPod said, nonplussed.
“Touché,” I said. “Now, let’s stop talking before the people around me think I’m nuts.”
“They already think you’re nuts. You have a bumper sticker on your car that says ‘There’s no place like 127.0.0.1’. You frighten and confuse them. They’ve probably called the police already. Hey, speaking of The Police...”
That’s when I put my iPod into the glove box, kids.
As fate would have it, there was a Woot Off that day, and one of the items offered was the Slacker portable media player. I’d heard of it before, but I hadn’t paid especially close attention to it; after all, I had XM and my iPod. Why did I need something else? What did the Slacker portable media player offer that I didn’t have already? Well, after a bit of research I determined that, distilled to its most fundamental essence, the Slacker is like Pandora-on-the-go. It combines a web-based music player with a portable music player where all your ratings and custom stations are synchronized. I decided to take a chance, and bought one for myself.
Two months and hundreds of listening hours later, I can tell you that, just like my first encounter with satellite, I can’t believe that I ever listened to radio any other way.
Like Pandora, Jango, and other web-based music services, there are a ton of pre-programmed stations to choose from and tweak to your liking, but where Slacker really shines is in the creation of totally customized stations that you continue to modify and optimize whether you’re on the go or at your desk. For example, two of my favorite stations on XM were Fred and Ethel. Fred was an 80s alternative channel, and Ethel was a modern rock channel. I was also a huge fan of Top Tracks, a classic rock station, and Big Tracks, its 80s arena rock cousin. Right up until the Sirius merger, all of these stations were awesome, but whatever uniqueness they once had is nearly gone. With the Slacker player, I have recreated all the XM stations I loved and miss. As a bonus, I’ve been able to explicitly tell all of my stations to exclude certain bands I just can’t stand - Linkin Park and The Eagles, I’m looking in your direction, and hopefully never hearing you again.
In addition to the basic “I love this” and “I hate this” options, Slacker lets you add and ban specific artists (“No, Slacker, I do not want to hear ABC on my Skinny Puppy station, but you go right ahead and put them on my 80s pop station.”) and tell the Mysterious Hivemind if you want older songs, newer songs, or a mix of both, as well as whether it should mix in new artists it thinks you’ll like, and play mainstream hits or more obscure “fringe” releases. I built a “fringe” station that only plays older music, built off Bauhaus and Joy Division, and titled it “Dark Entries.” It is awesome.
If you’re interested, you don’t have to invest anything other than some time, because the basic web player is free at Slacker.com. But since this is a gadget blog, I’m going to get specific about the portable player, which I absolutely love.
I have the most basic model, and I’m very happy with it, but the new G2 looks pretty cool. Once you own a portable, Slacker offers free and subscription listening experiences. The free version plays one 60-second commercial and allows up to 6 skips in an hour, while a basic subscription renders your listening experience commercial-free with unlimited skips and the ability to request specific songs. There’s a super duper premium subscription option that allows you to save songs you like and replay them as often as you want, but that seems a little excessive to me. I have the free version, but if my commute was longer than 21 feet, I’d probably want at least a basic subscription to get more skips per hour.
The player doesn’t actually use an antenna like a traditional or radio. It’s more like an MP3 player that lets you refresh your stations whenever you connect to a wireless network, as often as you like. Once connected, the Slacker server will take into account your ratings, and adjust the new music it sends to your player accordingly. It can take some time to train new stations, but all of mine seem to have learned very quickly, and the genre-based pre-built stations aren’t bad at all, and you can add and remove stations from the web player as often as you want. While you’re listening, you can see what’s coming up next, and navigate to screens that display album art, extensive liner notes, or band bios. This is much cooler and useful than it sounds, especially if you grew up listening to DJs like Rodney Bingenheimer or Uncle Joe Benson, who really knew their music history.
So is it worth buying a Slacker portable media player? Well, kids, it’s not going to replace your iPod, but if you still want to have a radio experience where you can exert a tremendous amount of control over what you listen to, or you want to discover new music within certain genres, my answer is an unqualified “yes.” And if you want to relive those horrifying days we called “the nineties,” where radio inevitably disappointed us and played whatever, there’s probably a Jack FM station dangerously close to you.
--Wil Wheaton
Wil Wheaton’s latest book, Sunken Treasure, can be yours as a DRM-free PDF for just five bucks.
Ted W. on February 28, 2009 at 07:00 AM
> A tiny, ugly piece of me secretly wants them to fail so I can have decibel@slacker.com back.
They are slowly creeping towards failure themselves. The Slacker service is fantastic, the players are not. The G1 portable was one of the buggiest devices I've ever owned, it took 8 months but the last firmware has finally fixed the problems. And now we start the process over with the G2. Random freezing, hanging while logging in, etc. And in the year 2009, neither of them are even mass-storage compliant.
Are you listening Slacker - FIRE YOUR HARDWARE DEV TEAM and start over from scratch with the G3 please.
seizure salad on March 01, 2009 at 06:41 PM
As a resident of Canukistan, I hope longingly for the day when I can use a device like this. As far as I know, the unavailability outside the U.S. is about licensing agreements in different countries, it's not the record labels trying to block anything. Slacker surely must be trying hard to negotiate licensing arrangements for territories outside the U.S. with the various licensing/rights organizations, I would think it's just a matter of time?
I agree with Sammy on the CBC2 comment - they're getting flack lately for trying to appeal more to the under 50 demographic, but I like the recent programming tune-up a lot.
Keith on March 26, 2009 at 05:12 AM
Let me tell you about a time when TV had dials, and no one ever heard of a remote control, and pause meant get up off your ass and turning it off. When no one knew what a video store was, and video had something to do with some club at school. When to get anything decent on the radio, you stayed up until the we hours of the mornings trying to tune in distant AM stations....
Frigging whippersnappers think you're old, you don't know old.
Great review though, checking out the slacker website as I type.
Lythande BlueStar on March 26, 2009 at 11:14 AM
Sorry, bud, but I like The Eagles old stuff--Witchy Woman remains one of my hundred thousand 'favorites'. The newest album I have from them is too countrified for my taste. Then again, Desperado is still on the above list, perhaps because it pretty much tells the story of an online friend of mine (who died several years back) who desperately wanted to find someone but could never quite open himself up to the possibility.
Well, so much for commenting on your review
Electronics Philippines on May 06, 2009 at 07:56 PM
I also agree with you, we don't have any control in whats happening every now and then. We should be aware about it. Thanks!
-seff-
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Great post, you should be writing for one of the gadget tech websites, at least it would be entertaining!
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