Chilly Posted May 11, 2005 Posted May 11, 2005 I know that this should probably go in the Consumer Forum, but I put it in here because of all the potential interest in a service like this. I've been playing with Yahoo! Unlimited Music service that they launched today. The catalogue is pretty good overall, although I haven't been able to download a few artists such as Metallica (we know how much they love online music) and Smile Empty Soul with it that I wanted to. Downloads are extremely speedy. On my Austin Roadrunner connection, a song that is 3 minutes and 23 seconds long takes me 10 seconds to download. Likewise, you also have the option of streaming the song if you wish. You can make playlists in their software of both streamed songs and downloaded songs. I tested playing a downloaded song in Windows Media Player 10 and it worked fine. Each song is 192kbps WMA format. I have downloded 128 songs so far, and its used about 735MBs. Yahoo stores it in the My Music\My Yahoo! Music\artist\album, and filenames are: track# - artist - title. If you prefer to stream the songs, you can make up playlists of songs that you wish to stream in their music program. I found streaming to be listenable, and buffering didn't take very long, although if you had a whole playlist to go down it would be a noticeable pause between songs. The Yahoo! Music Engine uses up about 60megs of ram on my PC if resources are a consideration for anyone. If you have a subscription compatable player you can also transfer all your songs from Yahoo! Unlimited to your mp3 player. You cannot burn them, however, without buying the songs. Once nice thing is their recommendation service. It has actually learned some based upon the ratings that I've given it. Its useful if you don't mind listening through about half junk songs to find newer ones to download, but then again I haven't been giving my ratings for very long, so it might get better then that. Overall a pretty good service at a fair price. I've been waiting for something like this to come out now to go with a legal way of downloading mp3s, and I think I'm finally satisfied. There are some bugs as its still beta, but its still better then any other offering on the market. $4.99/mo for annual, $6.99/mo monthly. Yahoo! 6.7/10 - I woulda rated it higher if they would have gotten more music.
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