June 1st, 2005
Hands On Review: Yahoo’s New Music Service Rocks!
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews.com
Last night I decided to take the plunge and see how I really felt about renting music online instead of buying it for .79 - .99 a song. I also couldn’t resist the offer: for $59.88 or roughly $4.99 a month for a year, and I could basically download all I wanted to my heart’s content. How could it be, I wondered?
So I went to Yahoo Music and signed up for the new unlimited service (there’s a free 7 day trial you can check out). I downloaded the Yahoo Music Engine, and within minutes I was ranking music, looking at recommendations, and clicking on entire albums to download into my unlimited “My Music” folder. I ended ended up clicking on so much, I left my laptop on and went to bed. When I work up I had over 400 new songs. My Cost: $4.99 and I haven’t even gotten started, folks.
The best part of the service is the rent or own choice you get. If I want to burn some favorites onto a CD, I will have to pay .79 a song, but I can also move a chunk of music to any compatible MP3 player (sorry no iPod support) and listen away for free. This is definitely a service for someone who has left the CD disc far behind. If you are truly virtual, then I suggest this service. Or if you want to sample a lot of things and then buy a few albums or songs you know you need to have, you really are getting the best of both worlds.
The Yahoo Music Engine software was easy to use but a tad quirky (it’s still a beta). It was easy to find albums and rank things, but I was unsure of how to move a single song to my MP3 player (you have to make a playlist first). And not many players are supported yet, so if you have one that isn’t on the list, you will be out of luck for the time being. Yahoo also bought my current music platform - MusicMatch Jukebox and will eventually move everyone to this new engine, but the software does a good job importing your own collection as well as integrating the massive downloads you’ll be adding from the Yahoo service.
Bottom line: For those unwilling to pay .99 per song and perhaps a bit worn out over illegal downloading, this is a smorgasbord of music at a price anyone can justify. If you have a compatible player you can take your tunes anywhere, or run the software on up to three PCs. Not a bad deal. Watch out Apple.
Tex says:
I tried it the first day it was available. It had so many programs running in the backgroung on my computer that the CPU would run at 100% for long stretches with no breaks. I ended up uninstalling the program, but at that price, I was hoping it would be really cool.
If it works for you great, but be sure you set a system restore point.
June 1st, 2005 at 6:37 pm
Alice says:
I haven’t had the problem and I use a Konfabulator widget that measures CPU performance and it is fine. When I had CPU issues I found the TiVo desktop app was sucking 84%, but so far yahooo music is fine. Odd.
Maybe you had an earlier beta?
June 1st, 2005 at 7:33 pm
David says:
What is the quality like, though? I don’t like anything under 160Kbps for listening (and I use .wma which is better quality at a given bitrate than .mp3). Typically with these download services you’re only getting 128Kbps it seems to me.
June 1st, 2005 at 8:37 pm
Alice says:
It’s all WMA but you can add your own libray of other formats. All downloads are WMA only though. Great quality.
June 1st, 2005 at 10:24 pm
Jason says:
Alice, can the songs downloaded from Yahoo Music be played on Winamp or are the wma files somehow restricted to the Yahoo player?
June 2nd, 2005 at 8:23 am
Alice says:
They seem to be restricted gto the Yahoo player, which is not bad and I believe will get better with the MusicMatch acquisition. I am on day 2 and up to 490 songs downloaded- cost $4.99 and day three is coming up!
June 2nd, 2005 at 8:24 am
James says:
Lucky you …
I can’t even get the ‘engine’ (?) to start or to start downloading with firefox 1.04 as a web browser. Perhaps they are doing maintenance.. ???
I would only give the web page a 50 % rating ..It is not clear at ALL how one downloads music or “launchcast radio station ”
All I get is you are using netscape errors or no response at all.
In a word … grrr, argh.(stolen quote from Joss Whedon)
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July 2nd, 2005 at 1:46 pm
Michael Neal says:
The list of compatible MP3 players is very slim. They have to support DRM. So that means that my pocket pcs aren’t supported as well as most mp3 players. There is a way around this though, a little research came up with a very good solution. There was also a glitch in the beta version and now my primary pc won’t store the secure content even after many hours of trying different fixes.
July 29th, 2005 at 9:03 am
Michael Neal says:
Also the content for new releases is pretty slim.
July 29th, 2005 at 9:03 am
Tom says:
Besides the Ipod non-compatibility issue (which should kill this kind of service off pretty quick,) this is a complete rip-off. RENTING music? You will never own any of this even if you’ve paid your $4.99 a month for, well, ever, basically. How is that a good deal? And if you want to burn songs to disc you have to pay EXTRA?! What kind of stupid sense does this make? The more people that jump on moronic deals like this just tell the music industry “Yes, please tell us how and where we can use our music, and yes, we also never want to own anything.”
August 16th, 2005 at 1:29 pm
Lockergnome's Tech News Watch says:
The iPhone has Landed
Maybe I’m the only one on earth yawing over this “big” announcement, but here’s the info for all you iPodders out there. Me - I’ll take the iRiver (30GB) and unlimited music downloads with Yahoo Music for $58 a year. “Gizmodo: The Motorola ROKR E…
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