In Which Pandora Loses a Customer

So today while at work Pandora crapped out on my phone.  When I say crapped out, it refused to play any station.  When I restarted the app it looked like it puked all over itself.

For me, music is life while at work.  It drowns out the outside noise and prevents unnecessary interruption.  I was now in a tail spin and trying to recover.  Then I remembered Slacker Radio.  It was already installed on my phone so I decided to give it a shot.

Dear lord I should have switched over sooner.  The Android app for Pandora was lacking.  I couldn’t easily alter stations and add extra artists manually.  I couldn’t easily block a whole artist or say ignore this for a month.  Well Slacker has all that in their app and I’m much more impressed by their selection algorithm.

After doing a quick initial artist selection I’ve only had to thumbs down a few times.  Even more awesome is I can create sister stations that will bring in new artists more regularly as well as less well known music.  That way depending on my mood I can lock it to the stuff I know I’ll want to hear, or I can switch into adventure mode and find something new.  Not to mention when seeding a station you can easily grab all similar artists as it lists them. 

So yeah, that little glitch that Pandora had today at least for me was actually a good thing. 

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About TMM

TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms. Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.

7 Responses to In Which Pandora Loses a Customer

  1. PT says:

    Spotify is pretty awesome as well. Not so much a radio but more like an unlimited iTunes account.

    • I used to have a Y! Music account.  That was awesome until they disabled the service.  I didn’t use it to buy music, it had DRM, but I had a huge archive and was constantly grabbing new stuff as it came out.  Awesome part was it synched with my MP3 player.

      I haven’t been too much of a music guy since graduating.  I listened to XM on the commute and would find new artists and toss them on the MP3 server.  I’m starting to search more now for music though.

  2. Jake says:

    Well, you’ve prompted me to try Slacker Radio, and I’m liking it so far. I haven’t played with the app yet (I’ve never really been into the whole “streaming radio to my phone” thing, despite having true unlimited data), just the website.

    •  I do the streaming to my phone at work because they filter internet radio.  With the whole campus streaming radio the bandwidth was getting expensive, or so they say.  Ultimately I think it’s horse crap and wish they’d leave it enabled.

      I do like the fact that if you have a subscription it can cache your station so if you loose service it will keep playing.  I’m not sure for how long though.  The lack of having to thumbs down so much as a bring up a new station though makes me very happy.  It makes it much easier to fire and forget.

  3. JeanC says:

    Checked out Slacker Radio today. I love my Pandora (I have about 30 channels on shuffle, so I get a nice blend of music and comedy over the day). But it does have issues. Tried Spotify, but when I went looking for a Broadway channel it gave me music that wasn’t even remotely related to Broadway. Been listening to a nice selection of old and new Broadway on Slacker. 

    Have to do more exploring, I like the option on Pandora of shuffling all my channels, not sure if I can create channels and then shuffle them on Slacker.

    •  I’m not sure if you can do the station shuffle.  That I will admit is one feature I didn’t really use.  I have a habit of making stations for moods and never the twain shall meet.

      There’s a few things I can hybrid together but there was no easy way for me to say, This and This, but not This.  Thus I never used it.

      You could always make hybrid stations on your own.  I was impressed with how easy it was to add artists to a station along with their style.  Made it easy to make my hybrid dubstep undead station.

  4. Joat says:

    I’ve been using Jango at work lately, but it doesn’t have the option to shuffle stations like pandora does.  On the plus side it has very few adds, and it brings up a good amount of new music.