Yahoo Music Unlimited is one of the few along with Rhapsody and Napster to be at the top of the online music services. I have long been a user of Yahoo’s free Launchcast Radio and enjoyed their Adult Alternative station and customization to my own tastes. I recently subscribed to Yahoo’s service as the price was convincing enough for me to switch from p2p (torrent, gnutella, etc.). The two years at $120 (only when paid with mastercard) ends up at $5 a month. Unless your university sponsors legal music subscriptions (Stanford’s for e.g. has $4.75 per month for Yahoo’s Unlimited to go service.), this is a great deal. I ordered the “to go” service because I decided that I would move some music onto my Axim x51 (low end 416mhz) instead of just listening from my computers which is only $60 for two years.
Anyways, I tried out the Yahoo Music Engine software before I signed up. I liked how the Launchcast radio played everything I liked, and gave great music suggestions. But sadly, my dell axim didn’t show up as a portable device. You can’t just copy songs onto a directly inserted into the computer. I googled and found out on this site and thanks to you guys it now works. What was wrong was I installed Windows Media Player 10 after I installed Active Sync. So all I had to do was uninstall Active Sync, and I reinstalled the new one version 4.2 from Microsoft. I have trend micro as a firewall, and luckily Microsoft’s error reporting directed me to this site
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobi...c/default.mspx to configure the settings.
Yahoo Music Engine now recognizes my dell and I’m really happy. I’ve been downloading ten albums a day, and it saves a lot of time, since I can stream any of the service’s 1.5 million songs so I’ve been looking into new genres like Celtic. Since I’m a student, I have trouble when I want to share the music, which is very hard with the WMA DRM format, plays only a selected number of “plays for sure” devices, and windows-mobile devices. I use TuneBite ($25) which effectively converts batches of protected songs into non protected formats legally. Tunebite plays the Yahoo wma’s (192) at 4x, and then records then at 160kps into mp3, wma, or ogg.
Yahoo music service streams 128kps and when you select albums and songs they are downloaded as 192kps. The engine is internet and windows media player based. Requires broadband. It is a little slow on my very slow ISP at home. In addition, the transfer rates to my dell axim are okay, on par with CF transfer when its in my Axim.
Overall, I’m very satisfied with Yahoo Music Unlimited. Yahoo should “add” Dell Axim x51 as one of their supported devices, only x50 is on there right now and they should also provide a quick tutorial on how to get the Engine to recognize the device. I have never tried Rhapsody, nor Napster so I’m not sure how they compare, but Yahoo deserves 5 stars, unless you don’t own a Plays for sure device like Ipod (great device, but 30 second samples on itunes doesn’t cut it for me), for which you can just use TuneBite.
On a random note: Embarrassing personal experience. The university computer tech guy comes. He asks me, “Are you Sleazy?” “Heck, no, what are you smoking.” He walks around, and checks other computers in the lab for music downloading. Comes back and asks, I meant, “Is your computer named Sleazy?” Lol.
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