Traction In-Game Radio Network Review

Another night on the web, poking and prodding various sites. I was thinking of hopping on my Xbox and playing a game, but I have a touch of the A.D.D. tonight. And don’t feel like committing that much time to one activity.

So when I logged into Xfire, I noticed a listing for an application called Traction. They claim it’s self as the World First In-Game Radio Network. It is a streaming music channel for gamers.

It seems to work fairly well, but is very limited in the number of music channels available. Each channel has several levels of music tempos. My favorite is the Rock Channel on Level 2 seems to have a good play list of songs. Currently there are 5 channels each with a different type of music. Hip-Hop, Electonic, Rock, Remixes, and Classics. The audio quality is quite good, even with the little amount of bandwidth that this program uses. I cannot find any information about just how much bandwidth this program uses. But with the setting and monitoring of my windows machine, I guess they are using about 10 to 20kb for the stream. The player has a voting and comment system build in as well. The tutorial states that the votes will help improve the quality of songs played. I assume that means the more votes a song gets the more it is played. There are also keyboard short cuts to help during game play. I tested this out with Guild Wars, Dungeon Runners, and Doom 3. I did not have any problems with key binding or the application interfering with the game. The only thing I did noticed, you may want to turn down the music of the game you are playing, they tend to blend together.

After some more digging, there seems to be a rather large following of listeners. The tractions forums are busy with post and suggestions. Busy forums are always a good sign that the application may stick around for a while. The parent companies Stickman Entertainment Inc. are based out of California. And have done game music for games such as Moto GP, Red Faction, and WWE.  

With any luck this little application will catch on and grow with more channels and better features. So far I like the programming and the easy interface. I plan on having some hard rock radio in the background of my next first person shooter experience.

GAME ON!

NetWrkGamr

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