Please explain Slacker and Last.fm to a Pandora User

MichaelBanning

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So I've used Pandora for years on my pc, and I love it. But since it will be a while (or never) before Pandora has an app on the windows phone, I'm considering trying something else. I've done some research on Slacker and Last.fm, but I'm still pretty confused on exactly what they are, the differences between the two, and the differences between either of them and Pandora. Help?
 

mindfrost82

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They're both similar to Pandora. I personally prefer Slacker and I pay for it. With the free version, you'll hear some ads and can only skip a certain amount of songs in a timeframe (I think Pandora is the same way). There's settings that let you adjust how deep the tracks go in an album (for example, only play well-known songs, or go deeper in an album).

I haven't tried Last.FM on WP7, I didn't even realize there was a client for it. On Android, it would Scrobble songs as you play them in your regular music player. This means that you don't have to search for songs you like to add them to a playlist. Instead, Last.FM would monitor songs you play in your music player, then automatically submit them to be added as favorites on Last.FM. I liked this feature quite a bit.

Hopefully Slacker will enable station caching on WP7 though. This was the big reason I paid for it on Android. This would let you cache a station so you could listen to it offline with no network connectivity. You can't do that on WP7 yet.
 

MichaelBanning

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They're both similar to Pandora. I personally prefer Slacker and I pay for it. With the free version, you'll hear some ads and can only skip a certain amount of songs in a timeframe (I think Pandora is the same way). There's settings that let you adjust how deep the tracks go in an album (for example, only play well-known songs, or go deeper in an album).

I haven't tried Last.FM on WP7, I didn't even realize there was a client for it. On Android, it would Scrobble songs as you play them in your regular music player. This means that you don't have to search for songs you like to add them to a playlist. Instead, Last.FM would monitor songs you play in your music player, then automatically submit them to be added as favorites on Last.FM. I liked this feature quite a bit.

Hopefully Slacker will enable station caching on WP7 though. This was the big reason I paid for it on Android. This would let you cache a station so you could listen to it offline with no network connectivity. You can't do that on WP7 yet.

Thanks for the reply! So what are the major differences between Slacker (free version) and Pandora (free version)?
 

spitothec

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I haven't used Pandora in so long that this might be somewhat misinformed, but I initially switched to Slacker because it doesn't cap how much music you can listen to, and seemed to have a MUCH broader selection of music.. I kept hearing the same music over and over on Pandora.

I'm also a paying Slacker customer. I'm not sure how they compare now, but as of about 18 months ago when I switched, it was mindblowing how much better of a service it was.

That being said, I've never used Last.FM :(
 

MichaelBanning

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It seems that Last.fm lets you create channels too - has anyone tried that? If it's all about the whole "scrobbling" thing, I'll go with slacker - I like having separate channels to fit whatever mood I'm in.

Thoughts?
 

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