Yahoo! Music - Download All the Music You Want to Your MP3 Player for $10/Month?
Written: May 29 '05 (Updated Feb 10 '08)
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UPDATE: Yahoo Music annnounced on February 4th, 2008 that they are migrating their subscription music customers to Rhapsody. The transition will occur mid 2008. See this FAQ for more details:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/music/rhapsodymigration/faq.html
The following review summarizes what Yahoo Music used to be.
Yahoo! Music (music.yahoo.com) is the latest company to offer online music subscriptions and burnable downloads, but with a new philosophy that may change how the market works. Yahoo! Music is offering users access to their music library for $120 year. At this price, users can stream and listen to any file, or download any of the over one million tunes to their PC, AND also download those files to the few new (see the list at the end of this review) portable mp3 players that support subscription based content (Janus compatible). (for $60 year, you can listen to the same library on your PC, but not transfer the tunes to your portable mp3 player) While the Napster, Rhapsody, and FYE players all also offer streaming and and support downloads to subscription compatible mp3 players, Yahoo! provides this service at a somewhat lower price than the other vendors. These "leased" tunes can be played only as long as you maintain your subscription. Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, and FYE charge about $15 per month for this service, if you buy on a month to month basis. Yahoo! Music currently charges about $12.00 a month for their “Unlimited” service, if you sign up for a year. As a subscriber, you can “buy and own” downloads for only $0.79, vs the standard price of $0.99 for non subscribers. Subcribers to Yahoo! Music Unlimited also get full access to Yahoo’s LaunchCast Plus service, which includes about 120 commercial free pre programmed radio stations, a service for which Yahoo charged $35/year on its own.
Signing up with Yahoo! Music
Whether you just want to “buy and own” one or more burnable music files from Yahoo! Music, or you want to sign up with their "Unlimited" subscription service and "lease" their library, you’ll need to download the free Yahoo music engine first. The Yahoo music engine is another player/ripper/organizer package, that’s not quite as mature as iTunes or Windows media player, but it is a truly a full featured player, with no crippled features.
My intent was to sign up with Yahoo’s unlimited service, which starts by clicking on the Sign Up Now link on Yahoo! Music’s main page. Two options are (now) listed :
$14.99/month on a month by month basis or
$11.99/year on a year by year basis.
Not being absolutely sure if I would like the service, I chose the 1 month option. You can cancel anytime in the first 7 days, and not be billed. Note that ones you sign up, Yahoo! intends to bill you on a recurring basis until you cancel your service. Sign up involves creating a Yahoo user account, providing a name and address and selecting a user name (which you must then confirm after receiving an email message), and then providing credit card and billing information. I already had a Yahoo user id, so all I had to do was sign up for the Unlimited service, which only took a few minutes. After downloading and installing the player, which took me a couple of reboots to get working, and then signing in, I was able to start downloading tunes to my PC, and listening to the music on my PC.
Getting the tunes to my subscription compatible mp3 player, a Creative Labs Zen Micro, was a little more difficult. The Zen Micro required a firmware update, which then led to a need to update the software the came with the player so that they would all work together correctly. Once I got all the software updates installed, the Yahoo! Music Engine recognized my Zen Micro, and I was able to download tunes that I hand found on Yahoo Music to my Zen Micro.
Using The Yahoo! Music Engine and Getting Tunes
Like many other media players, the Yahoo! Music Engine (YME) will search out the music files on your hard drive and add them to its library. Any songs you download from Yahoo are automatically added to the library. You can easily create playlists by using the YME’s directory-like view, by dragging and dropping tunes, complete albums, or everything by an artist to a playlist. Unlike some other players, YME can rip tunes from your cd’s and encode them to MP3’s at any bit rate, constant, average or variable. YME will also rip and encode to Ogg Vorbis, AAC or FLAC (but, strangely, not wma), and download album covers and track information from the Gracenote cd database. YME is also your interface to the Yahoo! Music service.
Late last year, to jumpstart their music business, Yahoo bought a company called MediaCode, a company started by former Nullsoft (Winamp) team members. That team spent most of 2004 building YME, according to one of the developer’s blogs (http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-FDuiCSg4eqinB8z.GGJ7TmAz?p=89 ). YME, uses an Internet Explorer interface. if you’re a heavy internet surfer, you’ll be right at home. It has the feel of a promising young product with lots of potential. It works well now, but lacks some of the features of Winamp and other more mature products (the mini-mode is kinda weak and there’s no equalizer yet, etc). Thy Yahoo! Music Engine supports plugins, its skinnable, and there are already a couple dozen interesting plugins available (http://plugins.yme.music.yahoo.com/ ). After two weeks of use, YME has started to understand my tastes, and is doing a good job of recommending new artists that I might like.
Using YME to find and download tunes from Yahoo! Music's web site to your PC works quite well. You can search by artist, album, or song. Hits are returned in a couple of seconds. When I enter a group or the name of a song, I usually get several hits, with the first being an exact match. The selection is similar to what’s available at Napster, iTunes, FYE, and other services, according to most reviewers who’ve tried both. I’ve used Napster a fair amount, since my wife has had a Napster branded mp3 player and a Napster account for more than a year, and I feel the selecton on Yahoo! Music is about the same as Napster's selection. I’ve found several music files on Yahoo! that were not on Napster, most recently, a French cd by Amel Bent that my son wanted to listen to. I mostly prefer to listen to classic rock from the 70’s and 80’s and found more than enough music on Yahoo! to make the music subscription worthwhile. I found plenty of music by many well known and not so well known artists from that era(Styx, REO Speedwagon, Head East, Survivor, Def Leppard, Mountain, Deep Purple, April Wine, Spirit, Dakota, Cheap Trick, Renaissance, and many more), but a lot of groups were missing (no Led Zeppelin or Triumph, and nothing by Lake, Triumvirate, Quarterflash, Legs Diamond, Axe, Red Rider, etc). I had similar success looking for more recent music for my children. Count on finding 50-75% of the music you’re looking for, a great start for a music collection, but far from complete. Yahoo’s selection is near “state of the art” for the online industry, but I’d judge “state the art” as mediocre at this point.
The YME can be installed on up to 3 PC's. For example, with one account, you could install YME on your desktop at home and at work, and a laptop, and listen to anything on Yahoo! Music on any of the three PC's.
The YME's key weakness is that when I try to use it to manage the files on my Zen Micro, its vvvveeeeerrrrryyyyyy slow. It takes 30 seconds to download a 5 mb music file to the player with YME. Fortunately, I can still use the Creative Labs software that came with the Zen Micro to download files to the player, which only takes a few seconds to download each tune.
Strangely, I've used this software to connect and transfer subcription tunes to a Dell Pocket DJ also, and in that case it works pretty well, much faster than it transfers tunes to the Zen Micro. Unfortunately, I've not been able to get any help from Yahoo! on this, support options are very minimal.
Sound Quality
Yahoo! Music’s audio files are Windows Media Audio (wma) files encoded at 192kbps using two pass encoding, a technique, which won't require more bit rate in order to improve quality, it will take a first, content analysis pass before encoding, nearly doubling the required encoding time… , according to Microsoft. I tried encoding a few tunes at 192kbps using Window media player, then compared the sound to identical files downloaded from Yahoo!, and I couldn’t hear any difference, and the file sizes were identical. I suspect the advantage of two pass encoding is too subtle for my untrained ears. Still, 192kbps is a higher quality bit rate than other services use (typically 128kbps), only at the small expense of somewhat larger file sizes, at about 1.4 mb per minute of music. WMA isnt’ the best possible encoding option, but it’s the format that supports DRM licensing, and most listeners will find the quality of tunes downloaded from Yahoo! Music to be very good, as good as you’ll find anywhere online.
Conclusion
Yahoo! Music introduced their service at $60/year, though now (as of Dec 2006) they've raised the price to about $150/year. At $5 a month, about the cost of buying 6 albums per year, I could lease as many albums as I can listen too, a price that seems fair to me. At the new, higher price, its a marginal value. Although the YME development team originally seemed to be listening to the community, and the user community is helping improve YME with more skins and plugins, lately I've been seeing more and more reports of Yahoo's failure to respond to requests for help and support. Still, if you own a Janus (subscription) compatible mp3 player, take a look at Yahoo! Music, but consider the slightly more expenisive alternatives (Napster et al) also.
Which MP3 Players work with Yahoo! Music?
A partial list of mp3 players that fully support subscription based services:
- Creative Labs Zen Micro
- Dell DJ 20GB (Gen 2)
- Dell DJ 30GB
- Dell Pocket DJ
- iRiver H10
- iRiver H320
- iRiver H340
- Dell DJ Ditty
iPods are not currently compatible with the Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription service, though the developer says YME can download files that you own to the iPOD
A partial list of other players that will play "burnable" downloads from Yahoo! Music, but do not support subscription based content.
- Creative Labs NOMAD MuVo˛ andMuVo˛ X-Trainer series
- Creative Zen Touch
- irock 800 series
- RCA Lyra 1021/1071/2010/2011/2012
- Rio Cali/Carbon/Forge series
- Samsung YP-MT6/YH-820/YH-925
- SanDisk 256MB/512MB/1GB players
This info and more on subscription based players can be found here:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/music/unlimited/unlimited-43.html
Recommended:
Yes
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