Slacker Personal Radio Review: Create Your Own Radio Stations on Your iPhone

One of the long-standing iPod rumors has been a model that included an FM tuner. Some people still can’t believe Apple never included that “simple” feature. Now, with the iPhone/iPod Touch being able to stream music from the Internet, I think it’s safe to say there will never be an iPod with a terrestrial radio. And using an app like Slacker Personal Radio, you wonder why anyone would still want one.

There are several streaming music players in the App Store, with Pandora being the most popular. Slacker is very similar to Pandora — choose an artist or song, and Slacker builds a radio station with similar music. There are also several pre-built genre stations to choose from. Slacker doesn’t seem to use the “musical fingerprinting” that Pandora does. Instead, it appears to be based on the genre of the artists. Still, it manages to put together a good playlist.

Slacker has a very diverse music selection of both independent and mainstream artists. To help me really put it to the test, I enlisted my friends on Twitter to suggest music to try. Searching for everything from Irish folk to Viking metal, I was able to find all but a few really obscure bands. I had less luck with song searches. About half the time, the band would be in Slacker, but the particular song I was looking for would not. This isn’t surprising considering how convoluted music licensing is, but it’s still disappointing.

But when it does find a song, Slacker plays that song — not just a similar song, which is what Pandora does. To me, this is a major improvement over Pandora. When you’re in the mood for a particular song, that’s what you want to hear first, not just something from the same genre. On top of that, Slacker gives you some control over what gets played on a station — you can increase how often songs you favorite get played, for example.

Overall, Slacker is an easy application to use. The UI is simple, and if you don’t have an account you can register for one right in the app. One minor issue is with searching: If you click on a search result to listen to the station and then go back, your search results are gone. If you wanted to try something else from your results, you have to search again.

I didn’t have any problems streaming music with Slacker. It took a little longer to start playing when I was on the EDGE network, but once it started playing it sounded smooth and clear.

With a free Slacker account you can skip up to six songs per station and (from the web interface) request a limited number of specific songs be played in a particular station. A paid account gives you unlimited skips and requests. With its large selection and advanced features, Slacker makes an excellent radio for your iPhone or iPod Touch. Slacker is a free download and available in the App Store.

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