brent phillips

If you’re like me, you already have some sort of MP3 and manage a significant number of songs, videos, pictures, etc through a utility on a PC. In my case, its about 10 videos, 50 or so podcasts, and about 2300 songs. I must admit, coming up with interesting playlists is getting more and more difficult because I find that I forget what I have and gravitate to the songs I know and like. Now - alas - I’m getting sick of my favorites. What next?

Walter Mossberg reviewed the Slacker yesterday which may be my answer. Building on the success of slacker.com, an online radio site, the Slacker is a device that plays sets of songs based on criteria you set and streams them to the device via wireless hot-spots.  According to Mossberg’s report:

The player is tied to Slacker’s free Internet radio service, slacker.com, which is already up and running, and allows you to listen to music via any standard Windows or Mac Web browser. Using the service, you can personalize your player by selecting from over 100 canned stations or by creating stations based around any of 10,000 artists.

In addition to some buggy behavior noted by Mossberg of a couple of prototype units he tested, he also offered the following…

Because Slacker is based on Internet radio, it has some limitations imposed by the rules governing that format. For example, you can’t specify a particular song to play, or skip back to repeat a song. And you can skip ahead only six times per station per hour. Even if you create a station around a particular artist, the station will mainly be filled with artists the service considers similar. Songs by the artist you selected will be played only four times every three hours. The player has a “heart button” for designating a song for frequent play and a “ban” button to eliminate the songs you hate.

The devices will run between $200-$300 dollars but the music streams will be free. This is in contrast to the XM and Rhapsody strategy of subscription services for their music.

Wonder if the Zune or iPod folks are thinking about this…Combining a best of breed device / service combo with a capability of picking up this service as well. Perhaps their own song lists or stations? It would certainly save me a lot of time and frustration…