With the Slacker G2, Slacker introduces some key navigational, design, and usability improvements to its second-generation portable radio player. That said, it's still a flawed device-though far less flawed. It's also a phenomenal concept that may lack mass appeal but will surely delight music lovers who don't have the money to buy all of the tunes they want. Let's start with the refinements. The Slacker G2 is a slimmed-down, slicker version of the bulky and buggy first-gen player; in the new model, all of the station updates (refreshing your song lists and adding new stations) occur over Wi-Fi. The company's online music service remains the shining star of the Slacker experience, and the new player offers a better portable version of that experience than did. The basic concept behind the player is simple: You build stations online for free, sync them to the player, and have a player full of customized music stations that play songs at random, based on the acts you selected and on artists whose music resembles theirs.
3Install the Slacker USB Station Refresher. Hardware or software to play Slacker Radio stations on. Want on your Slacker G2. •Installing the Slacker USB. Slacker USB Station Refresher (slacker.tray.exe). Flexible Resizing Re-size your player to be exactly the size you want. Keep it out of the way while you are working.
Syncing is done over the air via Wi-Fi; but if you have a Windows machine, you have the option of syncing stations over a USB connection and the downloadable Slacker Station Refresher software. That software isn't compatible with Macs, but you can still build stations on a Mac and then sync them to your player via Wi-Fi. A Slacker G2 player that supports 25 of your custom-built stations costs $200; a 40-station Slacker G2 player goes for $250., and you can add, refresh, and reconfigure your stations as much as you want. In addition to accommodating the stations you build, the $200 player allows you to drag-and-drop 1GB of music files (AAC, MP3, and WMA) onto the player, while the $250 version supports 3GB of storage. Loading individual files works only on Windows XP and Vista machines; building stations on the Slacker site and syncing them over the air also works with Mac OS X-but as with the first version of the Slacker player, you don't have the option of dragging and dropping your own files onto the player with OS X.
That's not a deal-breaker, since the player's chief draw is the station service, but you'll need a Wi-Fi connection to make the G2 update and sync your stations with Mac OS X. Some glitches that plagued the first-generation player, such as the almost unusable touch strip and the awkward earbuds, have vanished.
The new earbuds are a lot more comfortable, but the sound is tinny to a fault. You'll definitely want to upgrade to a better pair of headphones (the device has a standard headphone jack). I used and Phiaton MS 400 headphones for most of my test listening; both of these higher-end models significantly improved the G2's sound quality. Several of the first-gen player's strengths make welcome returns.
The 320-by-240-pixel TFT screen is nicely visible in sunlight, and it displays extensive information about bands and albums while a song is playing. The background data includes extensive band bios and album reviews from All Music Guide-another big reason that the Slacker G2 shines as a device for music discovery. On the other hand, navigation is still buggy; sometimes it has a mind of its own, especially when you connect via Wi-Fi to update your stations. In addition, we couldn't test the sound quality of the device itself due to firmware issues that flip-flopped channels and produced counterintuitive distortion readings (specifically, the device generated higher levels of distortion at lower volume levels, which never happens). As such, the overall rating is pending, because the Slacker G2 does things so differently-even at the level of producing audio-that were unsuitable for it to take. Users will either love or hate the Slacker G2's throwback controls. They're all buttons, wheels, and rockers, instead of touch-sensitive controls: a home button, a scroll wheel for navigating menus, and a lock button appear on the side.
Play/pause, skip forward, and skip back buttons appear below the screen. A heart button (to tag favorite tracks for more-frequent random playback) and a ban button (to remove individual tracks from the playback mix) appear above the screen. There's also a four-pin USB port for charging the player and loading tracks onto it. To my ears, audio quality was okay but not great; at times, the audio sounded a bit hollow or flat, depending on the song. And the distortion-at-low-volumes problem was palpable, with portions of audio tracks becoming muted or inaudible when I lowered the volume on the device. If your eardrums can handle the awesomeness, this player is best played loud. As for Slacker's Web-based service, if you aren't already familiar with it, you should give it a try.
Like, the Slacker site lets you enter a musician's or band's name and compile a customized 'station' of the artist and similar acts. The even one-ups Pandora with its customization options, by allowing you to request individual tracks from an artist, cherry-pick bands that you'd like to hear as part of a station, and even tweak the amount of new and obscure acts, popular songs, and recent or classic music that you want fed to your station.
Slacker Usb Station Refresher Program
Whereas individual Pandora stations can get a bit stale after a while, Slacker lets you refresh your playlists (over Wi-Fi or via USB on Windows) whenever you want. In my tests, artist-defined stations, in combination with the option to increase or decrease 'Music Discovery' preferences online, produced satisfyingly fresh playlists time and time again. But though Slacker outshines Pandora in online options and customization, it's not as polished as. So if you're into the touch-screen-heavy, fashion-conscious interfaces of most of today's gadgets, you may balk at the Slacker G2's way of doing things. If you already use Slacker's online service to build your stations and discover new acts, you'll find that the G2 is a vast improvement over the last piece of Slacker hardware. I would recommend this device to certain people I know, but not to everyone. The friends I'd recommend it to fall in a distinct category: those who listen to a lot of college radio, who are always thirsty for new acts, and who never tire of having a fresh playlist of music to listen to.for free.
People who grew up in the Walkman era may also be unexpectedly charmed by this player. This story, 'Slacker G2 Portable Radio' was originally published.
I was happy to see this, as I'm one of the minority who still prefers the software player to the web version. Thanks Slacker for stepping up and fixing this issue. You have shown great loyalty to your customers and I'm happy with my premium subscription. Here's what was posted: 'Hi everyone, We have just pushed out a small update to our web services that should fix the script error you all were seeing. We do apologize for the trouble that this has caused. Development on the actual Software Player has stopped at this time.
If you wish to use the software player, please consider it 'Use as your own risk'. At any time it might stop working, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get people to fix it in the future as quickly as we were able to this time. This is because we are constantly evolving as a company, and many projects we have going on require changes to our Website/Webservices/Servers, etc. Therefore, there will be a time that a change comes that we may not be able to resolve through other means. If you currently use a G1 or G2 player and use USB refresh, then I would recommend that you uninstall the Slacker Software Player and download and install the Slacker USB Station Refresher program. This has all the drivers needed to do USB refreshing.
If you currently use the Software Player to transfer MP3 files to your Portable, you may do this with Windows Media Player instead (or use drag and drop). If you currently use the Software Player to listen to your saved radio tracks, you can do this with the Website as well. When you log in as a premium radio subscriber account, you will have the 'Library' tab and all of your songs listed there. All in all, everything you could functionally do with the Software Player should be able to be done with the Web Player or Windows Media player.
Again, this was a hard decision to make (Stopping the Software Player), but with how quickly we sometimes have to act on things, the Software Player was always lagging behind. And there were things we couldn't do with the Web Player without major changes to the Software Player. We hope over time you will come to see what I mean. I appreciate all of your comments and feedback, and I'm glad that we were able to restore the Software Player back to where it was last week. But, I do need to make sure to point out that I can't promise it won't break again in the future.
Best regards, Rome E Slacker Support'. If you currently use a G1 or G2 player and use USB refresh, then I would recommend that you uninstall the Slacker Software Player and download and install the Slacker USB Station Refresher program. This has all the drivers needed to do USB refreshing.
If you currently use the Software Player to transfer MP3 files to your Portable, you may do this with Windows Media Player instead (or use drag and drop). If you currently use the Software Player to listen to your saved radio tracks, you can do this with the Website as well.
When you log in as a premium radio subscriber account, you will have the 'Library' tab and all of your songs listed there. All in all, everything you could functionally do with the Software Player should be able to be done with the Web Player or Windows Media player. Click to expand.I think this statement is key and the fact is you really should be moving away from using this, because while they may have patched it this time, they aren't going to keep doing that. I also know several new users that loaded it and this caused them problems in trying to use USB to refresh their channels. It was only after deleting and then installing the USB Station Refresher that they were able to get it to work. Initially I installed the Software Player, but once I realized it was really no different in most ways from the Web Player, I just uninstalled it.
I really see no reason to have both and in my opinion Slacker would do themselves a favor by just pulling the software all together. Especially since they are simply no longer committed to keeping it updated. Dump the software player Mike.
Your bound to have problems with it down the road. Just start getting used to the web player. I sent Slacker a email days ago suggesting to remove the install link. Or to at least post more information on the web site to explain the status of this software.
G1 owners are getting directions to use it in the packaging, and it is going to cause problems with all these woot people. It is all kind of confusing, and sloppy for new users. Sloppiness is what drops customers.
Sort of like sat radio as a example. Lets keep things tidy, and organized slacker. I think the only reason they patched the software was so the recovery procedure was still available for the G1. With goals of moving the recovery procedure out of the SP to somewhere else. Slacker is really busy keeping up with stuff right now. I really think the customer base has really grown this holiday season. All and all I'd say they are doing a pretty good job.
They do need to clear up the SP communication with customers though. I'm positive January will be a busy month for them. I assume the patch on the SP is a temp fix. Slacker is working on a new process to do a G1 recovery.
Probably something similar to the G2 recovery. You'll have to call customer service for the process. Once they establish that they will remove the SP download link, and it won't be available after that. As I understand it they want log codes off our players before we do recoveries so they can improve, and see the portables issues. Before recoveries are done. Obviously they are trying to get rid of the last of the warehouse G1's via woot. So they want to keep up on things.
I'm sure we will be seeing more unfold in the weeks ahead related to G1's support. Not really firmware updates, but basic operational improvements to support the G1 second wave users. If they did not want to deal with this stuff.
They would not have bothered selling G1's via woot. The woot was part of a bigger picture to market Slacker during the holiday season. Company wants to grow. Market is slow.
Offer great deals on first generation players that folks can't turn down. To get new customers, and make more room in the warehouse for new products.
While continuing to improve the overall slacker experience. To top it off have a forum where the company can have direct interaction with the users.
The marketing right now is brilliant. The docks will come, but right now they are preoccupied with higher priorities.