Slacker Radio is the answer to Pandora’s increasingly bad service. Like Pandora, Slacker Radio allows you to create custom radio stations with the ability to tell the station that you either like the current playing song or that you never want to play the current playing song again. However, Slacker Radio is better at this kind of service because it allows you to listen to original recordings that are not censored and it has better quality audio. I have tried Pandora and even paid a monthly subscription, but Pandora does not play original uncensored recordings despite the fact that I turned on explicit content. Perhaps some priggish Pandora users somehow caused Pandora to ban all explicit content? Or perhaps Pandora’s algorithm is mistakingly interpreting that I somehow don’t like explicit content, despite the fact that I turned on explicit content? I’m happy that Slacker does not have this problem and that it plays original uncensored music with high quality sound. Thanks for the great music, Slacker Radio, and keep the free-spirited uncensored music going—unhindered by the moralism that has apparently infected Pandora.

I love Slacker. I actually used it religiously about 10 years ago. It has always done a great job of mixing old and new with my custom stations. I left Slacker long ago when they made all the huge interface changes. I subscribed to Pandora and never really looked back. Fast forward to this week. I decide to see what’s going on with Slacker. Plus I wanted to see if my old stations had any gems I forgot about. I downloaded the app and connected it to my car stereo. The first thing I noticed was the sound quality was way better. Everything sounded more full than my pandora music. 2nd is that unlike pandora, my phone didn’t got into “accessory mode” making it hard to control it the way I want. 3rd was the interface looks great! Much better than the old blue colors of pandora. My only thing with it is why is it so hard to get to my custom stations? I couldn’t care less about the premade stations, I want to see a list of mine the moment I open the app. Instead I have to go to my music, then scroll around until I find custom stations. It should either be there from the get go or one tap away. Another bonus that I never thought I would like... djs and little snippets of news in between songs. They are short and informative and really make it feel like a premium radio station. Remember the old XM radio? It’s similar to that. Now XM has mindless bla bla bla in between songs. This is different and they nailed it.

I've tried all of the other major music streaming apps and nothing beats livexlive/slacker where it counts: playing a station that you won't end up endlessly skipping through. The ability to play music that matches what you're in the mood for is second to none, and the ability to fine tune a station to play newer/older or similar/more diverse music gives you all of the power to play what you like. And you can like or dislike a song and it stays specific to the station. So maybe you don't want a pop song on your rock station, or maybe you do, and it won't affect if it'll play on another station. I have stations for all different types of moods and nothing else comes close to being able to do this at well. One knock: wish you could skip back to a previous song when on a station. Sometimes i wanna hear the same song a second time without leaving the station.

Like many, I left Pandora a few years ago in search of something better. I was tired of listening to the same old things, the price just to remove ads, and those limited skips. I finally found Slacker, 3.99 a month for Plus subscription, featuring unlimited skips, no ads, and the BEST thing was offline listening for work travel or when reception was poor. It wasn’t uncommon to have minor issues with the app, but those were mostly just mildly annoying and often times addressed in the next update. Today I go to listen to my offline playlist as usual and was given a notification that I would have to upgrade to a Premium subscription to enjoy offline listening. What?? I did a bit of digging and realized that the Plus subscription has removed offline listening from its list of perks. Really?? It’s worse that I wasn’t even given a warning or a quick email/notification. They just changed it. $4 a month was the perfect sweet spot for what I got, but I don’t think it’s worth $10 per month. I find myself a bit distrustful of the way they went about it. I wouldn’t have been terribly upset if they increased their rate $1-2 per month with notice but to jump $6 a month? No way. Now I get to start doing some research again into switching music apps.