One of the more ambitious entrants on the social music scene, Slacker, has released the second piece of their three-part music personalization suite, a desktop music player.
Slacker’s player shares a lot of the core functionality of MyStrands and Last.fm. Users create a personalized radio stream by entering a keyword into the player. There is no rewind and specific songs can not be played. Users train the player on personal music preference voting for and against tracks played. Each song also features album art and a short synopsis of the band, but Slacker lacks the personal and band wiki pages users have gravitated toward on the other services.
Unlike Last.fm, iLike, and MOG, Slacker doesn’t track music you play in iTunes. Instead Slacker functions as a stand alone player that manages personal music libraries and delivers cool music visualizations.
The lack of iTunes integration is likely due to the expected release of Slacker’s own portable music player, which will integrate with the desktop player. Users will be able to push songs, playlists, and preferences to their portable player from their desktop. Eventually, Slacker’s three parts will work in sync, each updating the others with your latest preferences.
So, the Musicmatch guys are basically rebuilding Musicmatch. But this time with hardware (to come). Nice.
Hmm….Musicmatch must be building a MusicMisMatch
Btw, poor Duncan Reily and Nick Gonzalez’s posts dont get too many comments……Why? Aren’t they also blogging on techcrunch?
Sorry, I’ve fallen at the first hurdle – how do you add stuff to your library?
Like most people, I’ll stick with the iTunes/iPod combo – and use a tool like The Filter to get my playlists and recommendations.
Tried it but cant get it to work. I will stick with uPlayMe.com as an added bonus to match me with others and make music recommendations for all my media players. Yes, I am biased……:-)
I went to LALA; and I couldn’t get any song to play for more than the preview – besides the ‘radio’ which you can only fast forward …. that sucks!
Are any of you out of the US? Typical record label BS means Slacker can only work in the US. Also, for the Mac guy…you won’t need the desktop client to use the device. The web player can be used to manage all your stations, and you can then sync them over WiFi.