Slacker Radio for iPhone (free; optional subscriptions from $3.99 per month), much like competing streaming music service Spotify, has undergone several changes in the last few months as the battle for your listening dollar rages on. Slacker's latest update isn't as massive a change as the 2013 interface redesign, but the under-the-hood fixes make it more stable for sure. Slacker may lack a handful of features found in competing products, such as track crossfading and gapless playback, but it has enough standout features and content of its own to continue its reign as our favorite iPhone streaming music app.

Pricing and Sound Quality

Slacker for iPhone is free, but listeners can also subscribe to Slacker Radio Plus for a commercial-free experience with offline listening and unlimited song skips for $3.99 a month. The next tier up, Slacker Premium, delivers the ultimate experience with on-demand listening, the ability to create custom playlists, and more for $9.99 a month.

In testing, Slacker streamed crisp, hiccup-free audio over my home and office network connections. Unless you're an audiophile who's used to listening to music through higher-end headphones, Slacker's sound quality will satisfy. The Dirtbombs' "Ultraglide in Black" album sounded terrific as I streamed songs to a pair of Astro A38 wireless headphones. The bass lines were full and bouncy, and there's a good separation of high and low sounds. Certainly, a good pair of headphones improves the experience, but it'll only ever be as good the tracks you're streaming.

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Slacker's home screen has three sections that give you easy access to the service's deep content well. The top portion is a strip that highlights Slacker's curated channels, where you'll find such highlighted music collections as The Slacker Top 40.

The Stations section holds Slacker's dozens of genre categories. Tapping the Electronic music icon, for example, reveals multiple sub-genres such as Indie Electronic, Dub Step, and Trap. The category king is Decades/Countdown, which boasted more than 80 channels when I was testing. The My Vibe section houses curated playlists designed to set a mood appropriate to the time of day (Thursday Afternoon, for example) and your activity (Driving).

The My Music section lets you access your stations, playlists, bookmarked stations, and recently played stations. Three recently played stations also live on the home screen as shortcuts. Favorite Songs is easily my, well, favorite section, as it creates a station around songs you've marked as favorites. It's like having a personalized greatest hits station, and it's a joy.