Pandora vs Last.fm vs Slacker -- Personalized Radio Roundup

I've been trying to use Pandora since I got my moment, and recently have decided to try the other alternatives... I was pleasantly surprised:

Pandora:
I love Pandora. As a music geek I use it all the time on my computer to try to find new music. One of the things I was most excited about when getting a new smartphone was the idea that I could have my favorite service on the go.

... then I downloaded it. I'd like to hear people's personal experience, but on both me and my bf's moment, Pandora is flakey as all get-out. It stutters when I try to do *anything* else, even turning the screen. Sometimes it hisses at me. Sometimes it drops the ends of the songs. Sometimes it outright crashes... I've even had it freeze the phone to the point where I had to pop out the battery.

Even when it works, it stops playing music after about an hour... which may be mimicking the webservice's that asks "are you still listening" after you've idly sucked their bandwidth for too long. This is a horrible "feature" in a phone though, because most people are listening to portable radio when they're in a car (or in my case, a bike =) and it'd be unsafe to click-thru.

However... of the three music pickers, I like Pandora's model the best. Customizing a channel as narrow or wide as you like by adding multiple artists and picking your favorite tracks. It seems to be really good at picking just the right music for the mood.

Slacker:
Of the three services, this seemed to be the worst. The app itself seemed poorly designed with really basic gui mistakes that make it seem like it was cobbled together in an all night pot-party/coding-marathon.

It had many of the same issues that the Pandora app had, stuttering and whatnot. But unlike Pandora, it's music choosing algorithm was just awful. I tried putting in a nice instrumental surf band like "The Lively Ones" or "Bambi Molesters" and it would instantly load my playlist up with "Jan and Dean" or "The Beach Boys."

For those of you who don't know surf music... that's like typing in "Kanye West" and getting nothing but "Blondie" and "MC Hammer." It seems to be picking music according to rough genre associations. In other words, don't bother.

Last.fm:
This is the winner on the Moment. It was odd... reading the comments in the market, I wasn't expecting much. They talked about endless force-closes and other flakeouts. I was figuring the performance would be much like the other two services. I was wrong.

I don't know what's going on here, but it seems that this service that seems to be the most unreliable on other Androids, is the most reliable on the Moment. Maybe they use a different sound decoder/architecture/interface that's more reliable on our hardware, but it's undeniably better. It didn't stutter at all, so maybe it takes a higher priority. Obviously it slowed the rest of the system down, but between last night and this morning, I've had no crashes. None.

As far as the music picker... it's seems to cast a wider net than Pandora, which is to say, it's less precise. But that may be a good thing given that you can't seem to further customize a station in the same way that you can with Pandora. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no way to easily put together a station that plays old blues, new bluegrass, surf, punk and hiphop.

I mean, I'm somewhat familiar with the Last.fm service since I used to scrobble. So I know I can have a main user channel, but I don't think it's like Pandora where you can just arbitrarily throw together mutiple stations each with diverse tastes. At any rate, it wasn't grasping in the dark like Slacker. It picked a lot of tracks that I had never heard before and really liked.



So what're your impressions? Are you guys having similar experiences?

I was running pandora in my car (1/8 plug to 1/8 input in cd player) and it sounded like complete s***.  It sounded like i was listening to an AM station through a tin can on a string.  I even checked the higher quality audio setting.  Plus, whats the deal with no buffering the next song in advance?  It doesn't play seemlessly like on a pc...

Thanks aftermarketgirl for your review.  I have similar problems with Pandora (stuttering, having to kill it then restart it) but I do like the songlist it puts together.  (I'm afraid to search for "Bambi Molesters" to hear what it sounds like here at work because that would trigger the firewall and I would get a visit from IT)

I've heard a lot of commercials for Last FM but haven't tried it. Since you give it a thumbs up I'll give it a try.

I installed Droidlive last night and it looks pretty good.  I haven't had a chance to try it out a lot but it looks pretty cool.

On my Moment Pandora is way too choppy.  Last fm is stable and seems to work very well too.

As for Slacker, I installed it recently, but it starts up all by itself pretty frequently (more frequently than I see Last fm).  However, I think Slacker might be sucking my battery try/preventing sleep mode.  I just uninstalled it.

My vote is for Last fm!

I've tried pandora, slacker and last.fm(via tunewiki).  Although I like the music played by pandora and slacker more, the bass sounds horrible, so I'm sticking with last.fm . I also just installed jamendo, which is indie artist, but haven't used it yet.

I had issues w/ Pandora as well...skipped when sliding the screen, it literally changed the tone of the music (long story on another thread), so I ended up using TuneWiki instead.  It's a portal that uses both Last.fm and SHOUTcast, shows lyrics (if the song has them available), direct links to take you to YouTube to see the videos, quickly adds favorites, etc.  So far it's been the best for me.  I installed but have yet to try Slacker since TuneWiki has done such a great job.  My ONLY problem is that I've been having network issues while visiting Seattle, so it wouldn't stream...but I'm positive it's a network issue because EVERYTHING internet wise would stop working.  I'm addressing that on another thread.