Well, I'm still adoring Slacker.Com as my new customized internet radio station. My station has tons of variety and is almost never boring. In fact, the only thing I miss about Launchcast is the extent to which you could game the system to make your favorite songs play all the time.

Today, I shall order one of their portable players and see how that works. I think I'll do the 4g G2.

I'm currently on the seven-day free trial for Slacker.com. I'm still in the process of transferring my ratings over from Launchcast, so it's a little claustrophobic there still, but I'm really enjoying it. The quality is good, the catalog of music is awesome, and the song selection algorithm blissfully uncomplicated to the Byzantine one Yahoo was using. And even though having to re-rate my 10,000 favorite songs on a new interface takes forever, I'm kind of enjoying it in a meditative, something to do while I'm not really paying attention to the television sort of way.

My playlist so far this morning: Poi Dog Pondering into Love & Rockets into The Magic Numbers into Tahiti 80 into Rhett Miller into Saint Etienne into Heavenly into Sondre Lerche

Well, in my quest to find a replacement for Launchcast, I'm so far really leaning towards Slacker.com. I love the idea of Pandora, but the sound quality is a little low and there are so many bands it hasn't heard of. Also, it only works intermittently on my work computer. With Slacker.com, the quality is high and their catalog is startlingly deep for the music I like (The Cucumbers! Harpers Bizarre! The Astropuppees!). I also like the manner in which it suggests music you might like, so much easier than the multiple page reloads required on Launchcast.

And unlike Launchcast and Pandora, it really responds to my OCD-like need to control my playlist. Almost too well at the moment since I've just started programming it and am starting to get repeats.

Unfortunately, the free version is a little underpowered: you can only select 100 songs (but as many groups as you like) and you're stuck with ads. So if I'm sticking with it, I definitely need to pay up. The price is $4/month, which is $1 more than I was paying with Launchcast, but not bad at all considering how much I'll use it.

I'm also very intrigued by their portable player, which picks up a bunch of new songs from your playlist anytime it's near wi-fi or plugged into the net, so you can take your customized radio station with you anywhere. That's just genius.

Before I bite that bullet though, I need to give Last.FM another shot.

A lot of people seem very concerned about Livejournal laying people off in their American offices, which does indeed suck, but I was actually surprised to learn that the Russian owners had kept any of their American employees when they bought it. Especially since that staff was in a city as expensive as San Francisco. They were probably paying them ten times what they paid their Russian staff. So, maybe I'm being naive, but I don't see it as a sign that Livejournal is going under and I'm not going to worry about moving my journal just yet.

What does make me super bummed though is the upcoming death of Yahoo's internet music service Launchcast. I've got more than 10,000 songs rated on my personalized station, many of which were introduced to me by the service, and I've listened to it every day at work since I started it. It's been a labor of love sculpting my ideal playlist and it makes me a little sick to think about it all vanishing into the aether in a few weeks. I'm sure I'll adapt, but after five years of being my own station manager, it's going to be hard as hell.