Digital Home Thoughts: Delphi's SkyFi2: Even More Music to Shake Sticks At!

Keeping Tabs on Your Favourite Tunes
Another big new feature in the SkyFi2 is the addition of TuneSelect. It lets you store a list of up to 20 artists or song titles, and then actively scans across all the channels for that music. When it finds one a soft beep is played, the song's information is displayed on screen, and you can press the big "XM" button to instantly jump to the song. This is a nice way to keep tabs on your favourite artists, especially when they play on multiple channels. For example, my wife has Paul Simon in the list and the SkyFi2 will often find deep cuts playing on channels that aren't in our normal preset list.

While the TuneSelect feature is nifty, it has a few quirks that prevent it from being perfect. The biggest issue is that it doesn't consistently find songs. I will often be flipping around my preset list and come across one of my TuneSelect artists on the air, but the SkyFi2 didn't notify me. The other problem is that the beep that alerts you to a new song doesn't play through the line out. Instead, it comes directly from the unit. This means if you have a song playing really loud (for example, Since You've Been Gone by Ms Clarkson ) you'll miss the beep.

The last big issue with TuneSelect is how you add songs to the list. Actually adding the artist/song is very easy: when a song or artist you like is playing you press and hold the big "XM" button for two seconds. But at this point you have no way to select whether the artist name or song name is added. You actually have to set this preference beforehand deep in the menu, which pretty much limits you to adding by artist or by song, but not both. When you're driving around it's simply too hard to dig into the menu to change between the two methods and add the song.