SoundTrckr streaming music... can it fill the void of Internet Radio?

I loved and still love my E72.  So when I first started playing with my N8 I was shocked and disappointed to find that it did not come with the Internet Radio app (you know the one that ships with the E72 and many other NOKIA phones).  Also, OVI did not and still does not have an app available for Symbian 3 phones.  In my desperation I turned to other forms of internet radio streaming and that is how I stumbled upon SoundTrckr.  Here's a brief video I made on SoundTrckr...

SoundTrckr allows you to punch in the name of the artist and then it essentially plays similar songs from that artist's genre.  Generally speaking the song selection engine does a pretty good job of picking tracks.  And with the 8,000,000 songs that SoundTrckr claims is in their library, it really does put Pandora's 750,000 songs to shame.  Also, it has a geo-positioning social feature that basically lets you listen to artists/genres that are popular in your location.

Sound quality is acceptable and the GUI is polished from a visual standpoint.  I generally stream music in my car and the streaming/buffering scheme is pretty solid because it is incredibly rare for a song to skip or drop.  This was very impressive to me because using the stock Internet Radio app on my E72 I used to find that certain patches of my commute would cause issues.  Of course there are many variables at play here... I used to listen to quite high bit rate channels on my E72 (192kbps and up) and I can't readily tell what the bit rate is on SoundTrckr so it's hard for me to judge if bit rate is a factor.  Also, I'm not sure if there are differences in the RF reception sensitivity between the N8 and E72.

I do though find SoundTrckr's touch screen response time and general maneuvering to be sluggish.  This is something I've gotten used to so it's not too big of a deal.  Another annoyance is that for artist name entry there is only one option and that is to use the alpha numeric keypad.  For some reason it doesn't allow you to access the horizontal qwerty keybad.  Again this isn't too big of a deal because I have already entered most of the artists I want to listen to and once you've done that they will show up under your My Stations list every time you open the app.

One bug though is that the app crashes from time to time and I've narrowed it down to the following.  SoundTrckr allows you to skip songs and you are allowed to skip as many songs as you'd like.  Sometimes (and this happens very rarely) if I skip songs too quickly the app will just freeze.  This doesn't happen very often but when it does I have to force quit it and reopen the app.  Also the app is pretty heavy from a RAM resource standpoint gobbling about 25MB of RAM when it's streaming.

In conclusion I am really happy with this app.  It satisfies most of what I wanted in streaming music.  The one area that I am still left hanging though is when I want to listen to continuous electronica mixes.  The E72's Internet Radio was fantastic for this and unfortunately with SoundTrckr it seems like they simply don't stream long DJ sets.

Oh yea, and SoundTrckr isn't yet available in the OVI store but it is available in NOKIA's Beta Labs.  I made another video explaining how to access it in case there are people who are intimidated by Beta Labs.