Ahhh… streaming internet radio. One of the few things that gets me through the work day. (That, and a Diet Coke at lunch.) Since 2002, I've used Yahoo's LaunchCast with relative success, even more so when I got a free Plus subscription when we got Verizon DSL. I have LaunchCast to thank for discovering artists I would have never listened to otherwise, and also for providing comic relief in the forms of Chris Rock, Ron White, and others. Despite the few problems I've had with the service, it was VERY customizable with a rating system for artists, songs, AND albums. Can't stand Jewel? Ban her indie junk forever. Love Maroon 5's new album? Hit "4 stars" and the songs will come up pretty frequently. And to top it off, Plus users got unlimited skips.

Unfortunately for me, Yahoo closed the customized station portion of LaunchCast last year. It was a sad day for me, as there wasn't much of a viable alternative to a station that would allow for the type of ratings that LaunchCast did. I started using Pandora, which at first was pretty good, but the rating system wasn't great, you couldn't specifically ban artists, there was a bandwidth limit per month, and you only got a few skips for an entire session. I could never really get into Last.fm, and the "real" streaming radio stations were mostly weird ones from Europe. Apparently Top 40 in Germany is NOT even in the same realm as Top 40 here in the States.

After I threw in the towel on Pandora, I brought up another Google search in the hopes that maybe a new customized radio service had been created… and that's when I discovered Slacker Radio.

Despite its name, Slacker Radio isn't a slacker. In fact, it's a pretty hard little worker, and it works on my government computer. The free service is light years better than Pandora's, as you are given six skips per HOUR (not limited per session like Pandora's), you can specifically BAN artists/songs (not this "thumbs down" or "I'm tired of this song" crap), and you can set how much "suggested" music you want played, AND they have comedians' albums! Oh happy day!

Like everything in the tech world, Slacker isn't perfect. Their rating system could use a little work, such as "I like this artist but you've played this song 74231 times but I don't want to ban them entirely," their mobile application only works on BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Palm, and Windows mobile (no Symbian, but then again no one really has Symbian apps), and the ads on the free version are annoying and you have to actively click to "dismiss" some of them. For example, I love Jeff Foxworthy, but when I've heard the same track over and over and over, it's hard to go through and specifically ban them… plus whenever you ban something, you use up a skip. So the alternative is to listen to it again, then go back and ban it when it's finished playing.

Either way, I think I may have found my LaunchCast replacement. Let's hope they don't remove half the features on the free version so I don't feel compelled to shell out $50 for the Plus subscription.