[cardshark]

If this is too involved just give me the heads up and I will not waste anyone's time. Being relatively comp illiterate hurts my cause.
I have Pandora on my phone. It works well, quick, sounds great. The trouble is the selection for an old timer like me. I was trying to build a station of polka music and 90% of what I got was bluegrass.
Enter, Slacker. The selection of polka music is terrific, but, alas, the problems. Seems to buffer alot, waaaaaay to long to react. If I go to menu to ban an artist, sometimes I get the option "don't ask again" but usually not, and lastly I'm not figuring out how this caching works.
I cached the station, or so I thought. Played about 15 tunes, and got the message that I've hit the end to re-plug into my PC to refresh.
Have a bberry 8310 Curve thru ATT with 4.5OS
Any help to help me to build/refine my polka station would be [I]ETREMELY[I]appreciated

[Lady Daze]

I had some errors with it too on my 8900. try deleting the app and re-installing, then registering under a different email address. ...it worked for me! good luck!!

[sandmanfvr]

It is kind of slow on the Curve, but on the caching, DO THAT! You need to install slacker, then go to a station and hit the Blackberry button and select it to cache. It will talk to the network and then ask you if you want to cache it, you have some many you can cache etc etc. Click ok/yes. Then plug you BB up, and turn on mass storage mode. If the autorun comes up and wants to run the slacker sync software, do that. If not, go to the blackberry and look for the slacker sync exe and run it. Then let it cache the station. Done! Now the station is ON the memory card (like 250 megs of music at a time) and plays from it. It still takes a couple seconds to start playing but plays great afterwards. Then after you listen to all the songs, you repeat and resync and your newest bans and loves songs are updated and more music comes down. So you get part of the station at a time. Rinse, repeat.

Slacker takes like 10 seconds to start up, kind of stuttery here and there in the interface, but sounds great and runs fine. They just got 2.0 out and I think they will be improving.

[cardshark]

thanks, sandman, been away from my comp and just got your response. Pretty much follow everything you say, but like just now, i was listenine to the station I created, and after only five songs got the mess. that i was out and had to plug in and refresh. I plug into my pc and do what? Nothing happens. Any help?

[cardshark]

One last stab at someone helping me out. I have gone so far as to reload Slacker. STill, I save a few songs, try to ban the artist, but the songs keep coming up, I cached the station, went back to play the station and three straight times said i had to refresh the station, (even though I just did) Now the fourth attempt and all it is doing is giving the Please wait..logo for the last five minutes. If anything, can someone direct me to a site that might give me info???

[netwerx1]

What size is the memory card you have installed? It will only fill the cache to the amount of memory you have available.

[cardshark]

4gig memory card. I know there's plenty of room. Like I say, I pluginto comp to cache, go back to play on bberry and I get six, maybe seven songs and it's telling me i need to refresh again!?

[netwerx1]

Not sure what to tell you then...I would say make sure that Slacker is reading the memory card correctly. Other than that, not sure...I have a few stations cached (albeit with just a tad more mainstream than polka music) and they all play fine, I never get a message telling me to refresh. If I think of anything else, I'll let you know; otherwise keep us posted on your success getting it resolved.

[cardshark]

Ok thanks anyhow. Probably just going to give up and dump Slacker. It's a shame, because I've probably located around twenty or so thus far, it's just that I am having a trouble caching, and then there's that really annoying trait of banning an artist/song, only to have it come back two or three songs later!!!!

[netwerx1]

Another question...do you have Slacker Plus? I know that if you create stations with selected artists, it will play songs from similar artists...but if you only found 20 polka artists, that "automatic playlist" is going to be very limited...probably why Pandora selected bluegrass tunes as "similar". If you have Slacker Plus, you can further customize your stations to have specific artists and songs, thereby creating a station that has every song from every artist that you select. That may allow you to play all the songs you want to hear without getting the refresh after only a handful.

[cardshark]

Slacker Plus=not free, correct? And actually it wasn't 20 polka artists, only a couple, but when one of them is Frankie Yankovic, you don't need anymore artists. He only recorded about a thousand polkas and waltzes during his liftetime (seriously)!!!

[netwerx1]

Well then that explains it...the free version of slacker won't just play specific songs or specific artists, you'll need to spring for Slacker Plus...$3.99 a month, you get unlimited skips, no ads, plus the ability to set up your custom stations...it's "unlimited song requests":

"Create perfect custom stations by requesting an unlimited number of your favorite songs. Simply search for any artist and pick the songs you like to add to your station."

EDIT: Just to test this out, I went into my Slacker Plus account and created a station with only Van Halen songs, and banned all other artists that it tried to add to the station. It seems to work, I now have a station that is only playing Van Halen songs.

EDIT 2: It said "station exhausted" and stopped playing after about 5 songs. It appears that you need more than just a few artists in your custom station in order for it to work correctly.