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.

Can you download the protected songs to your SD card or CF?

Yes, Yahoo Music recognizes both the device's storage and removable card (I have a CF card). They are conveniently listed as two separate devices. As I said earlier, after uninstalling and reinstalling Activesync, I got Yahoo Music and WMP 10 to recognize my Axim x51, which is absolute must for transfering licensed and protected wma's. You can get Yahoo to customize "highly rated", "diverse artists", etc. songs to create a random playlist to fill up the free space on your mobile device or just manually transfer songs onto the device. The transferred music are well organized in a folder called Music, artists subfolder, and albums subfolder. It's very convenient and not time consuming.

18...old enough to get blown up in wars...but not old enough to get drunk afterwards.

This is a very nit-picky question but...
Does the transferred music keep in the same order as on a CD on the Axim (the first song on the CD is the first when you open the album)?

What do you think about the liscencing problems some users have been having?
Here, for example: http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showt...ahoo+unlimited

Yes, same order, each track is labeled. Licensing problems have never appeared on my laptop. However, I'm a little peeved that Yahoo didn't provide a useful tool for moving songs between computers. I copied several albums I downloaded from my notebook onto my desktop's Yahoo Music folder. I guess each computer licenses songs uniqueuly, so they screwed up my desktop's music, and I get licensing errors. Personally I would have kept everything on one computer. But with all the music I'm downloading, I can't fit it all on to my notebook's 80GB drive for a long term. Because of this, I use tunebite every week-removes drm protection, and spend 5 minutes organizing the files into folders based on album & artists. I use windows media player to organize my music library and synchronize with playlists. Works fine and no worries with the annoying drm protections, but is jolly fine with me just to appease the music industry, while we use tunebite.

18...old enough to get blown up in wars...but not old enough to get drunk afterwards.

Can you convert the imported music into OGG?

EDIT: Can tunebite do that?

Yes, Tunebite offers ogg, mp3, and wma. I'm also considering MuvAudio right now. Offers alot more outputs, though I use mp3. It works like a jiffy, too, has more options to convert (select output hierarchies, etc.) MuvAudio uses virtual sound card, so your system's sound doens't interfere. Intead of offering 4x, realtime recording, MuvAudio can process 10 conversions at the same time, thus claiming 10x. Thewretched, try both trials, and see for youself. I'm leaning toward MuvAudio at the moment.

18...old enough to get blown up in wars...but not old enough to get drunk afterwards.

Yes, MuvAudio seems to be the clearcut winner, I will try to test both when I get back from vacation (about one week).

Just how legal is this? It certainly seems like pirating music to me...

(I really need to finish my thoughts before I post them)
EDIT: Whats to stop you from purchasing the non-to-go yahoo music unlimited, removing the DRM protection, and putting it onto the Axim? This would be 1/2 the cost.

Also, how do you like WMP? I went straight to TCPMP, so I haven't had experience with it. Is the battery life bad? Sound quality? Interface?

Everything is legal. You technically aren't doing anything illegal. I have no compunctions. There is a 100+ page forum on this particular topic on cdfreaks's forums. The regular Yahoo package allows you to save onto the computer. It's fine for you Axim if you plan to use MuvAudio. I got the to go package to easily transfer random playlists or their top alternative 100 hits onto my dell axim. The Yahoo Music Engine effectively integrates the radio, my music, yahoo music streams. MuvAudio, Tunebite take some editing (I'm really busy), I usually just get them to process whole albums I want to keep in my library even after my subscrition ends.

Listening on Axim. I use psShutXP, it's freeware, and you can assign a button to turn on/off display after you get the music playing. The new Windows Media player 11 is amazing, I let it shuffle songs onto my axim. I feel that pocket WMP app has easier accessibility than tpmcp.

18...old enough to get blown up in wars...but not old enough to get drunk afterwards.