Station Programming

[styckx]

I do frequent the Slacker Programmed channels a lot, I must ask, how often are these things actually updated?

For instance, 90's Rock is a great channel, but even after a full erase and reload of the channel I'm still drowned with Rage Against The Machine CONSTANTLY, also hearing a lot of the same songs from other various artists. The playlist doesn't seem to vary that much. 10 years there was a lot of music, I would love it if these channels were actually reprogrammed on a more regular basis. I've noticed this on 90's Alternative also. Nothing much changes.

Anyone else notice this with any of the other Slacker programmed channels? I checked the 90's Rock forum @ Slacker and it's a ghost town.

 

[sphere79]

They're certainly not updated as much as they could be. I haven't listened regularly to 90's Alt lately but there was a direction change a few months ago that people weren't too happy with. I think they were trying to make the default settings play more hits, with the idea that if you wanted deep you had to tweak it. Apparently after that direction change the station played allot more Nirvana and Pearl Jam than it used to.

 

[Jon]

That's what is nice about the service, you CAN tweak to your liking, you can ban certain songs or complete artists from a station, and fine tune so it plays the fringe stuff. I have the 80's Alternative station sounding like a dead ringer for the old 'Fred'.

 

[DAB]

Slacker certainly doesn't have full time programmers or DJ's that is for sure, but when you are offering a free service, you have to keep operating cost down. I think these guys probably put in a minimum amount of hours on these stations. I too wish they mixed it up a bit more, but I have found I can create my own and get the exact mix of music that I want. Clearly like any radio station, online, sat or terrestrial if you listen for 5 to 8 hours a day it will get stale very quickly. Slacker does give you some options though, unlike sat and terrestrial.

I created my own stations so that I could add as many artist and songs that I want to give me long period of time between refreshing. I have some station that have 500 to 600 artist and/or songs. In the course of my listening over a weeks time, I rarely hear any repeats, but we are talking about half dozen or more of various stations. I don't just listen to one or two stations all the time.

There are a couple of things, I find on the preprogrammed stations it is best to leave everything on auto, once you start making changes you narrow down the amount of variety a given station will play.

The other thing to bare in mind is that when you refresh music is added, I am not so sure music is actually removed, though they claim it is. But the biggest thing is that music is reshuffled, so now you are apt to hear the same music over again. This is why I try to limit my refreshing to weekly as this allows me to listen through a whole playlist in a given station thereby reducing and/or eliminating repeats. I think this is a big problem when folks refresh everyday. I used too, but I learned quickly that it is best not to do that unless I am trying to build the amount of music in a given station. Once I accomplish this, then refreshing should be done far less often.