Today I moved to the Jango Radio iPhone app. It requires registration, but you can create an account directly from the app, and Facebook isn't required. I immediately introduced to a video ad, but afterwards I haven't experienced any other video or visual ad. The app is pretty basic compared to Slacker, for example there's no track or artist info, but it has a sleep timer and an option to avoid cellular data usage.
There are quite a lot of channels, plus you can create your own based on artist you like. The top channels tended to be a bit too "mainstream" to me, but making a channel from an artist and tuning it to have "wide variety" worked quite well. Tuning stations by rating up or down songs on those artist channels had a noticeable effect too. The song selection doesn't have as many "latest hits" as Slacker, and the classical stations seemed too shallow for me, but otherwise it has a quite lot to offer.
I noticed that the iPhone app lacked a history of the tracks you heard, but if you log on their web site the history is there, including a filter to show all tracks you rated up in artist channels. I'd still like to have a way of sending in an email the current track information to make note of it or share it with friends,
Overall, I liked the experience. It's not spectacular by any stretch, but the music selection is good, the app was simple, the streaming was stable, good sound quality, only a few ads, and free. Given the few options we have in Canada, a good service like Jango really stands out.
Published on August 15, 2012 at 21:22 EDT
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