As expected, Slacker Radio is preparing to unleash a major 2.0 update to their iPhone app that will bring with it an offline music listening mode that caches hours of music to your iPhone, and we’ve got some preview details on the upcoming app. While some streaming music services put an essentially limitless library of songs on your smartphone, they’re all limited by the need to maintain a wireless data connection in order to function properly. Slacker Radio 2.0 offers the same sort of limitless aural possibilities (through radio stations, of course), but will allow you to cache radio stations and their music for offline enjoyment.
It’s not clear just how many songs, or how many stations, are cached in Slacker Radio 2.0’s buffer for offline listening, but Dave Zatz mentioned that each of the six stations he cached had at least a couple hours worth of tunes stored for later use – it took about 20 minutes to cache each station over WiFi. You can cache up to 25 radio stations at any one time. The app is pending approval from Apple, so with a little luck we’ll see the cache-tastic 2.0 version of the iPhone app hitting the AppStore later this week. You’ll also need to pick up a Slacker Radio Plus package if you’re looking to start caching radio stations.
The launch of this new feature should help the app compete with streaming music apps that offer a vast library of music to you over the air. Rhapsody 2.0 for iPhone already lets you store a chunk of streamed music to your iPhone for offline use. Now, Slacker Radio 2.0 is getting ready to do the same for those times when you’re out of range of any wireless data networks.
We’ll keep you updated on this app update. Stay tuned!
Slacker Radio (FREE) [iTunes link]
[Via: ZatzNotFunny]