Review: Soundtracker Radio
Score:
64%
Okay, Soundtracker Radio is an interesting one. It's another "music based social network" web service with a mobile client, but unlike Flowd, which I looked at on Monday, Soundtracker isn't as impressive in its presentation, or in the implementation of this application. It lets you stream music from user-generated "stations" of music, but there's not much else of benefit here.
Version Reviewed: 1.5.1
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Soundtracker has two elements: musical stations generated by you and by your Soundtracker friends. While you could just punch in the name of a band or singer to start one of the music streams, the developers hope you'll look at stations suggested by your friends. Because I can't see any other function of finding friends beyond this. There's no communication potential, there's no "friends of friends" functions, or anything else more advanced than cyber-snooping on their musical tastes.
The friend system allows you to find people who are members of Soundtracker, and if you feel the need to get an instant dump of friends into the system then you can have Soundtracker look at your friends on Facebook and/or Twitter to see if anyone is already a member - if so, the Friendship link is made.
To be honest, this is pretty standard stuff, but what's surprising is that it looks like the only way to find a friend, because the search box is only for finding musical artists to listen to. That's a fail right there, because I can't see why you'd have a barrier to finding people on the service (unless the developer wants those login details for Facebook or Twitter...) What you can discover is people who have been listening to music close to your present location, and a hyperlink allows you to befriend people that way, but this is a rather awkward way of getting started.
Okay, let's create my own channel. I'll start with one of the more under-appreciated bands of the sixties, The Hollies. Good start, it opens up with Jennifer Eccles. Then the server software starts exploring, bringing up other similar bands, so the next tracks are from Peter and Gordon, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J Kramer. That's a not bad spread, to be honest. Let's try The Beatles, famously protective of their digital rights. An interview on Italian Radio with John Lennon, a vocal bridge from a compilation album, another radio interview, followed by tracks from Wings, Cream and the Pink Floyd. Not so accurate or appealing.
Neither am I clear on the value offered by the opportunity to listen to the same audio stream as my friends, no matter where they are in the world. There is a certain "that's kinda cool" to this but practically, well, it's a shared experience in your mind, but I'm not sure that's strong enough to differentiate Soundtracker in the real world.
It's important to remember (especially if you're a lawyer trying to work out how much Soundtracker should be paying to stream all this music) that this is radio-like streaming. By suggestion a starting point for each station, you never know what is coming next, and neither can you rewind a song or listen to something "on demand." Certainly in the UK that drops the cost of the licence down by some margin, but it does also give it a specific use case that's been superseded by services like Spotify.
There are also a number of UI issues that make Soundtracker less effective as an application. It only runs in portrait mode, and while this isn't unusual for smaller apps, it still count against it. More worrying is the lack of support for the volume keys. I'd expect that to be consistent over any media application, rather than having to resort to a slider on the screen.
While I'm not going to pin the blame on Java, Soundtracker has not been the most stable of applications on my E7, with long pauses to process information, and locking up as new audio streams are started - this is especially a problem if you hit "forward" a few times, as each track needs to be started before you can skip to the next one. Tap too many times on the skip button and the app gets a bit confused.
To be honest, Soundtracker is... cute. It does something that is still technically a difficult challenge, but it's a challenge that's been picked up by many other companies, many with slicker applications than this. Is there a place for "radio like" random listening? I think there is, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the answer is Soundtracker.
-- Ewan Spence, June 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at