Being the huge music fan that I am I jumped on the new Slacker Music Service the very minute that they released their online music player. It's free (and ad free until the paid service is ready) and I like bright, shinny new objects. I am a heavy user of both Sirius and XM Satellite Radio and listen all day every day while at work and this seemed like a great fit for my rotation.

I didn't love their online music player. It really shot the browsers RAM usage through the roof and I was more frustrated with it than I thought I would be. Then a few days ago Slacker released their desktop radio player. This thing is cool.

It's been very light on RAM at about 10 MB when playing music but has a high virtual memory tag at about 100 MB. This doesn't slow down my system at all, but your mileage may vary. It has also been rock solid for a beta application. No hangs, crashes or other nasty happenings.

The thing about this service is the vast selection of music. My daughter says that my iPod is owned by a schizophrenic, but regardless of what I am in the mood for they have it. The service allows you to tag favorites which will increase the number of times you will hear tracks from that band as well as add in more music from similar artists. You can also mark a song as a "hate" and not have to hear it again.

I am a heavy user of satellite radio being a subscriber of both Sirius and XM so I don't know that I am willing to pay for their premium service for an as yet unannounced price. I do really like that I can tell the software what I like and what I don't like and it adjusts for my interests. I will certainly hang with the free service if the ads are reasonable in frequency and I may just go for the subscription if it isn't a killer.

You can download the Slacker Desktop Radio Player here.

Technorati : Sirius, Slacker, XM

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For reasons that are my own, I don't really dig in to the iPod vs >insert music player here< battles because there really is no right or wrong side of the coin. You love your iPod, or you love your iRiver or whatever else and that is all that matters. I do however read all of the hype about convergence between cell phone and music player and how the iPod will lose dominance to the music enabled phone. One word. Thirteen letters. FORGETABOUTIT!

I have a music enabled Treo. Not a single song loaded on it. I have a music enable LG something or other. Not a song loaded on it. I just got a music enabled Razr for my personal phone. I won't load a song on it. My wife and daughter just got music enabled Samsung phones. Neither of them will load a song. Why not? After all there were 10 times more music phones sold last quarter than iPods and I have a total of 7 of them if you toss in my son's phone. No. No. No.

I stopped at Verizon this past Sunday to get the new phone. It was time. As I stood there waiting for help I listened to Chevelle Point #1 on my iPod. One of the Verizon greeters came up to me and of course tried to instantly sell me on their LG Chocolate phone as he saw the iPhones hanging out of my iEars. I'll save you the details of what he said to try to convince me to buy it (he never lied once) but I shot him down with some very real and simple points.

• All of my 400+ CD RIPs are in 128 kbps AAC. iTunes defaulted to this years ago and I have never felt the need to change it. None will play on the Chocolate.
• I have purchased well over 200 songs from the iTunes Music Store. None will play on the Chocolate.
• I have downloaded well over 100 free songs from the iTunes Music Store. Again, none will play on the Chocolate.
• The LG has less memory than my 1 GB 1G iPod Nano. $200 for a music player and then another $100 or so for a 2 GB Micro SD card. That is double the price that I paid for the 4 GB 2G iPod Nano that I bought for my wife a few weeks ago.
• The LG has FAR less memory than my 30 GB 5G iPod. No card available to match that one.
• I LOVE iTunes. I do. Manages my music perfectly. Allows my family to share libraries with zero config and purchases from the iTMS allow us to load protected AAC files on all of our iPods. It's not perfect, but it works very well for me.
• Verizon charges $1.99 per song plus $15.99 to enable the Vcast service which you have to have for music to work on the phone. iTunes songs are .99 each and there is no monthly subscription price to pay to get my iPod to spin the tunes.

The greeter was well schooled because he said, "you know, you could re-rip all of your CD's and burn your iTMS songs to CD and re-import". After a painful 10 seconds of very awkward silence he smiled and said that he would get someone to change me to the Razr.

I have a difficult time keeping enough of a battery charge to get me through the day using my phone as a phone. None of these MP3 phones has the ease of use or the click wheel that my iPod has and only two phones from Cingular have iTunes on them. As much as I would love to have a single device that I could put in my pocket to handle my phone, email and music I will continue to carry my iPod, my Razr and my Treo.

Convergence doesn't work for me. Until Apple pops an iPhone.

Technorati : Verizon Wireless, iPod, iTunes

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