Complex as they are, traditional MP3 players really don’t amount to much more than ultra-condensed CD libraries. Whether they have flash drives or hard drives, LCD screens or OLED screens, use buttons or scroll wheels, they all function as digital trunks for holding music. Drop your songs in, play them, and change them up when you get sick of them.
For those who already have substantial collections of unprotected digital music, this model makes a lot of sense. But with the growing popularity of legal digital music alternatives in which ownership of music isn’t exactly black and white, the landscape for MP3 players is getting a little more complex.
Slacker, a provider of both free and paid Internet radio, recently debuted the Slacker Portable, which twists ordinary music compression technology into a device that works quite differently, at least from a user’s point of view. While it’s still an MP3 player in a technical sense, it behaves more like a radio by harnessing Slacker’s existing Internet radio service, in a portable form that doesn’t require an active Internet connection.
Operation is simple: connect the Slacker Portable to your computer, tell it which of Slacker’s existing 100 Internet radio stations tickle your fancy, and after a download period, those stations are on your device, legally and completely for free. Behind the scenes, it’s simply prefetching songs on the station’s playlist and downloading them to the device, but to the end user, it’s free Internet radio, without the Internet. There’s no existing music collection required, no paid subscription required, and no need to pick and choose music track by track.
The interface on the Slacker Portable mimics the Web interface on Slacker’s own site. Users select which preloaded station they want to listen to, and the player automatically queues up music. The degree of control over what pops up on a station hovers somewhere between the precision of an ordinary MP3 player and the diversity of FM radio. While it’s possible to pause and skip tracks, users don’t actually own any of them, so they can’t navigate through the radio playlist like they might with a regular player. However, purchasing a subscription to Slacker Premium for $7.50 a month allows songs to be added to a personal library where they can be played until heart’s content – as long as the subscription remains active.
Slacker Premium also unlocks the ability to skip unlimited tracks in a row, adding to the control users get over the automated programming. And whether users choose the free version of Slacker or the Premium version, they can always flag artists as favorites or ban them from their stations forever, allowing further fine tuning of the content. Fans of a particular artist can even create their own stations using that artist as a base, with Slacker automatically choosing similar-sounding music to fill the station.
The Slacker Portable comes in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB models, which translate to capacities of 15, 25 or 40 stations in Slacker parlance. That’s with 100 songs for every station, and between 500MB and 4GB of personal storage space set aside, depending on the model. More importantly, the Slacker Portable comes with integrated 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, making it possible to sync up with Slacker automatically and without wires whenever your home network is in range, keeping content as fresh as possible.
Physically, the Slacker Portable is a bit more imposing than your average flash-based player, spanning over four inches tall, 2.76 inches across, and 0.67 inches deep. The advantage of that rather large footprint comes in the form of a mammoth 4-inch LCD that consumes the front of the device, pushing most controls, including dedicated buttons for flagging songs, to the sides. Unfortunately , the player won’t handle video files, so all that screen can only be used to display menus, album art, visualizations and banner ads, which are mandatory with the free version of the service.
While even the 2GB model runs for $199, significantly more than other players with the same storage capacity, the Slacker Portable’s features also plant it in a different niche that may justify its higher price. Other options for digital radio on the go, like portable XM radios, can easily hit $200 – and there’s a subscription fee on top of that, so Slacker’s price premium remains competitive. The models with 4GB and 8GB of storage cost $249 and $299, respectively.
If you’ve already ripped your entire CD collection to high-quality MP3s and have organized your own massive digital library, chances are a more traditional MP3 player would suit you just fine. But for newcomers to the age of digital music, or just folks who want to expose themselves to new tunes outside their existing collections, the Slacker Portable may make a very attractive option.
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