July 18, 2005
Yahoo! Music Unlimited Review
For the past five or six weeks, I’ve been playing with Yahoo! Music Unlimited, one of the first online music services to take advantage of Microsoft’s Janus technology. Janus allows for subscription-based digital rights management (DRM) – in other words, you can pay a monthly fee and download all you want. The new wrinkle, though, is that Janus is now supported by a small but growing number of portable players.
Napster to Go was the first in the field and Rhapsody’s subscription service followed soon after, both at around $15 a month. Yahoo!’s major innovation wasn’t the product itself, but the price: $60 a year.
For that $5 a month, you can download or stream as much of Yahoo’s music library as you want. The subscription can be activated on up to three computers (which is a little stingy) and uses the ominously-named Yahoo! Music Engine for downloading, syncing, burning and whatnot. The $5 only allows for downloading, streaming and syncing with devices. If you want to burn a CD, you’re in for $.79 a track or about $8 per album.
How does it compare to the iTunes Music Store?
The real question. Interface-wise, the Yahoo! Music Engine, which is still in beta, lacks a lot of the polish of iTunes and keeps the service from being a totally dominant product. Yahoo! clearly intends for users to download the player and use it to organize music (you don’t need to be a subscriber to use it), but it’s not best-of-breed. It’s still in beta, so hopefully some speed issues can be worked out, as well as a fix for an annoying tendency for the player to log you out of Yahoo!, even if you say to remember your username and password.
Aside from some clunkiness with the player, though, it’s a whole different world from using iTunes. You’ll never be satisfied with a 30 second clip again once you can download the entire album without paying anything extra. Double-clicking on the song streams it, while pressing a different button downloads the file into your music directory. The songs can then be managed and played in any program that works with Windows Media files including Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center.
The files themselves are 192kbps dual-pass WMA files (compared with iTunes’ 128kbps AAC) and, to my ear, sound excellent. Transferring them to a portable player or burning to a CD yields music that should be acceptable to anyone but a serious audiophile who shouldn’t be looking at lossy music anyway.
In addition to downloading or listening to songs on your hard drive, there are “radio stations,” which are fully interactive playlists based on songs that you’ve rated. Better still, the subscription gives you access to LaunchCast, another Yahoo! for-pay service that uses XM-style genre stations to let you listen to randomized music. A nice plus is that, if you hear something you like on one of the stations, you can rate or download it.
How’s the selection?
They have a lot of great stuff. No Bettie Serveert, sadly, but pretty much everything I like is in there, along with some great live stuff. Ben Folds, Son Volt, Wilco. If there’s something specific you want me to look for, leave a comment. They claim a million-plus songs and the catalog is very deep.
Does it work with the iPod?
Short answer: no. It doesn’t work with Macs either.
Unfortunately, the iPod doesn’t play WMA files and, in all likelihood, never will. Steve Jobs has said that he doesn’t believe in the subscription model (and, after selling 500 million songs on iTunes, he probably won’t), so iPod folks are out of luck. The Windows Media devices that work with Janus include the newer Creative, Rio and Dell products which lack some of the sex appeal of the iPod.
For my experience, I used a Dell Axim X50v PDA, one of the first to ship with Windows Media Mobile 10 and Janus support. It’s not quite as handy as my iPod, but the ability to dump hundreds of songs onto it for virtually no money outweighs my affection for the iPod’s spiffy design.
What happens if you don’t pay?
All of that music comes at a price, and that’s your subscription. You have to connect to the service at least once a month to let your music player check with Yahoo! that you’re still a subscriber. If it finds out that you’re not, your music stops working. Eerie, eh? Incidentally, it doesn’t seem to work if you’ve used Windows Media Player to transfer the music onto the device, so you’re better off using the Yahoo! Music Engine to do it. Hopefully that issue will get worked out before the product comes out of beta.
Is it worth it?
If you like to sample new music, it’s the best $5 you can spend. You could buy five songs on the iTMS or you can download as much as you want. If you find something you really like, you can buy and burn it. At 20 cents less per song than iTunes, it’s a good deal even if you prefer to buy a lot of music.
I’ve heard people say that they prefer to “own” their music and, honestly, I’d rather have a CD any day than a digital file, but if you ever find yourself buying music that you listen to for a week and forget, this is a great service that helps you “get songs out of your system” without having to pony up $15 for a CD or $.99 per track.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 14, 2005
Who's stealing Son Volt CDs anyway?
Argh...
I bought the new Son Volt CD, "Okemah and the Melody of Riot," at Best Buy last night. Seemed a good deal -- $11.99 for the DualDisc version with a bonus live DVD. The DVD side of the DualDisc has the album in 5.1 audio and a 30-minute documentary which I haven't listened to yet. Despite the ominous warning on the back of the label ("The audio side of this disc does not conform to CD specifications and therefore will not play on some CD and DVD players."), I wasn’t worried because Ben Folds' "Songs for Silverman" had a similar label and played fine.
Whatever they've done with this disc, it's a problem, and a bad one.
I tried to play it on my car's CD player this morning and it skipped. It usually won't even get recognized by the CD/DVD drive in my PC at work and when it does, it plays very stuttered. It seems to have played all right on my Mac, but I haven't listened to it through yet (I was almost hoping it wouldn't so I could say I have a defective disc).
From what I've read, it sounds like the ability to read it varies from drive to drive. I understand the desire for copy protection, but this is insanity. I could have listened to it streamed for free on the sonvolt.net site or for free on Yahoo Music, but I bought the disc and I'm treated like a criminal.
Other similar reports on the JayFarrar.net message boards. Here's one.
Caveat emptor, yo.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)