Slacker Adds Automatic Music Caching to Android Phones

Slacker Android

Slacker Android

Cellphone streaming represents the ultimate combination of convenience for consumers and business model flexibility for online music companies, but there’s one big problem: data connections, in the U.S. anyway, aren’t up to the task of streaming hours of high-quality music in a row without dropouts. And as more people begin streaming media to smartphones, the problem will only get worse.

The solution — pioneered by Slacker on its own hardware, embraced by Spotify, and promised by Rhapsody — is to cache music on the phone so that you can still listen to your collection even without a fast data connection.

On Tuesday, Slacker added the interactive station caching feature to its Android and Blackberry music streaming apps with a new wrinkle: The apps can now refresh the music automatically at night, but only when the device is plugged in so as not to waste battery power.

For now, Slacker’s iPhone and iPod Touch apps lack station caching and the associated nighttime auto-refresh feature, but Slacker demonstrated iPhone music caching at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and according to Slacker spokesman Anders Steele, the iPhone version will be released “soon.” (For once, the Blackberry crowd can gloat about an app feature not available to iPhone users.)

This update is great news for Android and Blackberry phone owners who enjoy Slacker’s $5-per-month streaming music subscription — or who want to try the caching feature with a 14-day free trial. Without caching and other extra features, the Slacker service is free on the computer and phone.

As the move to cloud-based entertainment continues, expect this feature to show up in all sorts of apps for the car, phone, netbook, boombox, or anything else that needs a data connection to play music or video, but doesn’t always have a fast enough connection, or any connection at all.

The addition of nightly auto-refresh makes a crucial feature all the more effective. After all, if you like your music stale, you might as well use a regular MP3 player.

February 24th, 2010 in News | tags:

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