Yahoo Music Unlimited revisited

I posted this about nine months ago, and I feel I should post an update.

June 14, 2005

Yahoo Music Unlimited

I've been trying out Yahoo Music Unlimited since Friday, and I'm of two minds.

I love the fact that I can stream almost anything in their catalog, including complete songs and albums. They've got a good catalog that I can take advantage of while connected at work. It's a great way to get exposed to more music -- way better than iTune's 30-second snippets, which can be downright frustrating.

What sucks is I can't put music on my iPod. I don't want to put rental music on my iPod, just the stuff I'd buy. I won't buy because of that. If a Jhymn-type tool existed for Janus-protected music, that'd be enough, but I haven't found one yet.

So I guess I try music in Y!Music Unlimited and buy it in iTunes. Not such a bad deal, so long as the music is in both catalogs.

I'll post about the merits of each player later. In brief: there's essentially no comparison. iTunes rules. Apple really knows how to create a user experience.

Posted by wesleyt at 08:24 PM

Life is strange. A buddy here at work was asking me how to fetch older versions of web pages, so I showed him how to fetch stuff from Google's cache, and I used my old weblog URL as an example. I stumbled across the above example while I was listening to music with the Yahoo Music Engine for the first time in a long time. A friend of mine earlier asked me if I knew of Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave Overture. I didn't off the top of my head, so I looked it up in Yahoo Music, and downloaded an album by Andre Previn and the London Symphony that included it. I copied the album onto my iRiver T30, which I use as a voice recorder, and to listen to Yahoo's Janus music.

Most of the time when I want to listen to Yahoo Music downloads I use Windows Media Player, since it's much lighter on my system. But I used YME today.

I think that's interesting.