Yahoo Music Unlimited 1.1

Reviewed on 8/8/05    Updated on: 3/3/06    Release date: 5/11/05    When we first looked at Yahoo Music Unlimited and the Yahoo Music Engine desktop software that drives it, we saw a buggy beta of an all-you-can-download subscription plan with an unbeatable low price but not much else to recommend it. Upstart Virgin Digital is now the price leader, with its Red Pass service, which costs only $7.99 per month for untethered downloads. While it charges a still-competitive $11.99 for its competing subscription, Yahoo has also diligently fixed, polished, and enhanced its service, making it easier to create playlists--which now sync to your other registered computers--and burn CDs. The new version also lets users wirelessly stream subscription songs to supported home-network music players and transfer them to compatible portable devices directly from the online catalog or any playlist.

Setup and interface of Yahoo Music Unlimited 1.1

Upgrading from an older version to the current Yahoo Music Engine is harder than it should be since there's no dedicated button within the program. You'll need to download the latest version manually. Be sure to select the custom install option; otherwise, Yahoo will stick you with a whole slew of other apps that you likely don't want, including the notoriously sticky browser toolbar--it's never comforting when a company tricks you into installing its products. That said, downloading and registering the Yahoo Messenger software has the upside of allowing you to share music with other Yahoo Messenger users from within the YMU application.

To get started with Yahoo Music Unlimited, click the sign-up link, and enter your Yahoo ID or create a new one. If there's a plan you like, enter your credit card and contact information, but remember to cancel after a week if you want to opt out after the free trial. Yahoo has two subscription plans; the cheaper costs $6.99 per month (or $59.88 per year) and allows unlimited streaming and tethered downloads and no CD burning; the full subscription plan costs $11.99 (or $119.88 per year) and allows unlimited untethered downloads--that is, they can be transferred to supported Janus-compatible portables but can't be burned to a disc. For a CD-burnable track, subscribers have to pay 79 cents, while nonsubscribers pay 99 cents; this is why buying a compatible portable player makes more sense than using burned CDs as your main untethered listening method.

Billing is automatic each month or year, if you're on the annual plan. If you end your membership, all of your downloaded subscription content expires at the end of the subscription term. Yahoo and most other subscription services offer a short grace period where your tracks will play a few days beyond the subscription term. If you resubscribe, you need not rebuild your entire library, preferences, and playlists; Rhapsody keeps this info for six months in case you resubscribe. However, if you have local files--as most users will-- you would need to download one new track to get an updated root license, and then all local YMU files should work again. If you wish to download only the Yahoo Music Engine without the YMU features, no credit card is required. You can then purchase CD-burnable tracks or albums as if from a regular nonsubscription online music store If you end your membership, all of your downloaded subscription content expires. If you resubscribe, you'll need to rebuild your library, preferences, and playlists; Rhapsody keeps this info for six months in case you resubscribe. If you wish to download only the Yahoo Music Engine without the YMU features, no credit card is required. You can then purchase CD-burnable tracks or albums as if from a regular nonsubscription online music store.

The Yahoo Music Engine is your portal to the YMU service. Its layout is similar to Rhapsody 3's, but Rhapsody's curvy panes and contrasting colors make that application look slicker than the Yahoo Music Engine's flat, mostly gray interface. The left-hand pane provides easy access to YME's main sections--including Yahoo Music Unlimited's main page, your personal music collection, and your list of portable devices--while a new right-hand pane always displays your current playlist, even when you're doing something else, such as browsing the online catalog. Though a welcome addition, the right-side playlist pane leaves less room for browsing the service's music content, which is now sandwiched in the middle and is a little too tightly compressed on our 17-inch monitor.

In YMU's middle pane, you can search the service's contents by artist, album, and song, as well as check out other users' playlists for music to stream or download. The home page displays new album releases and customized music recommendations based on your personal preferences. You can rate any track you come across; the engine uses your ratings to help determine which music to recommend. A pull-down box called Browse By Genre provides another useful means of navigating YMU's content.

Most tracks have streaming, downloading, and buying options; some are available only for subscribers, while still others must be purchased as à la carte downloads (79 cents apiece for subscribers and 99 cents for nonsubscribers).

Like most other digital music stores, Yahoo Music Engine houses an integrated music player with all the requisite playback controls and information, such as current track, artist name, album title, and album artwork thumbnail. Clicking an album opens the artist's home page in the Yahoo Music Unlimited service, but unlike Rhapsody, Yahoo Music Unlimited doesn't provide outside links to the artists' own Web sites. Editorial content is almost nonexistent, and the little that's there ("Rock 'n' roll is often used as a generic term, but its sound is rarely predictable.") tends toward blather. Clicking an artist's bio pops up an irritating Web browser window; that content should display within the Yahoo Music Engine itself but perhaps had to be outsourced due to the aforementioned space considerations.

Features of Yahoo Music Unlimited 1.1

With this revision, Yahoo adds some much-needed features that make it easier to use and more competitive with its online music rivals. Chief among them is playlist sharing, which not only makes it easy to share your playlist creations with the YMU community but also lets you search on and view other people's playlists. This is only a start at integrating good community features, but at least it lets you see other people's choices while removing the unsettling feeling of shopping in an empty store. Unlike the iTunes Music Store's iMix feature, YMU lets you hear other users' playlists in their entirety without purchasing each song (assuming you're a paid-up YMU subscriber), but it appears that Napster is still the king of community features, with its forums and a feature that lets you see what any other user is listening to at the time.

Playlists are also easier to create than they were in the first version since you can now drag songs or albums from the YMU store straight into the playlist pane. Yahoo calls this a scratch playlist; populate it on the fly, then listen to, save, or transfer it right onto your (compatible) portable device.

YMU uses Yahoo Messenger as its main conduit between members, so if you don't already have it and want to get the most out of the YMU community, you'll need to install it. After adding another Yahoo Messenger subscriber to your Friends list, you can browse and stream tracks from their personal library but can't download them directly to your PC or vice versa. If you like what you see, designate that member as an Influencer (you'll be listed as their Follower). Influencers' musical preferences trickle down to their Followers' recommendation sections, which could save time when you're looking for new music to try out.

In response to gripes that the last version didn't play well in the living room unless you connected a compatible portable player to your stereo, Yahoo now lets users stream music over their Wi-Fi networks, from their computers to their network music players. This easy process supports several popular home players, including models from Roku and Netgear. It even works with YMU's streamed content so that you don't need to download songs to play them and can access Yahoo's myriad streaming radio stations from the couch. Considering network music players' mysteriously low adoption rate so far, we're guessing that few will use this new feature, but we give Yahoo props for making home streaming so easy. People like to listen to music in their living rooms, on their full-size speaker setups. For more than a year now, iTunes has had a similar feature, but it works with only Apple's own AirPort Express.

We're surprised, however, that Yahoo didn't beef up its subscription or download catalogs much for this release. YMU still offers more than 1 million tracks, most--but not all--of which are available via subscription and for individual purchase. However, iTunes and Virgin offer more than 2 million songs. Yahoo carries all the main artists many will likely search for but not the same range of little-known tracks offered by the competition.

While it plays only purchased, protected tracks from YMU, Yahoo Music Engine's jukebox functionality handles a broad assortment of audio file formats, including MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and the lossless FLAC. Yahoo Music Engine can also rip CDs to all the aforementioned formats except WMA, and MP3s can be created at bit rates up to 320Kbps, including variable bit rate, or VBR.

As for streaming radio stations, both YMU subscriptions include Launchcast Plus Premium Radio, with more than 120 programs queuing up songs that you can skip past if you don't like them (unlike the static stream offered by terrestrial or most other online radio stations). Impressively, YMU's subscription offers streaming and downloadable 192Kbps WMA files. That's a higher bit rate than what you'd get with Rhapsody To Go, which has 128Kbps WMA streams and 160Kbps downloads, or Napster To Go and Virgin Digital with Red Pass, both of which offer 128Kbps WMA streams and downloads.

To transfer subscription-downloaded tracks from Yahoo Music Unlimited, you'll need a Janus-compatible portable player such as the iRiver H10 (5GB or 20GB) or the Creative Labs Zen Micro. MP3 players that aren't compatible with WMA subscriptions but accept secure WMA tracks (this includes most big-name, non-iPod players sold within the past few years) can play tracks purchased individually for 99 cents without a subscription.

A new right-hand playlist panel simplifies the transferring and burning of songs within the application. Each account can be used with up to two different portable players; in comparison, Napster's competing to-go service supports two, while Rhapsody allows up to three. You can access a YMU account from three different PCs, and now, any playlist you create on one PC automatically transfers to all your registered computers. This thoughtful addition makes it easier to keep your chosen slice of YMU's music catalog organized across multiple locations. It's also worth noting that if you hit your three-PC limit, you can deauthorize any of them, allowing you to add a new PC to the account.

Performance of Yahoo Music Unlimited 1.1

Our testing of version 1.1 of the Yahoo Music Engine revealed a newfound stability in the application--a welcome change from the shakier beta. We experienced no crashes, hiccups, sluggishness, or transfer issues. Our only disappointment is the slight lag in changing screens (for example, going from the My Music section to the main YMU store page); we typically had to wait 5 to 10 seconds for this page to load on our broadband connection.

The 192Kbps WMA downloads and streams generally sounded good, as they should have, considering their high bit rate. But when we compared them side by side with the same tracks rented from competing services' 128Kbps songs, the improvement ranged from undetectable to subtle, depending on the track. In other words, YMU's higher bit rate is a nice bonus, but it wouldn't be a determining factor for us (many audiophiles don't care for CDs, let alone compressed files).

Track downloads started quickly, with most taking a mere 5 or 10 seconds to download all the way. The software's integrated CD-burning engine successfully burned and finalized a 698MB playlist of MP3s to a CD-R in less than 5 minutes via a 40X-maximum-speed burner. The software can also burn MP3 or normal audio CDs using from your unprotected music library.

Searching other users' playlists is fun, and as you rate more artists, YMU seems to develop a good idea of your tastes, making decent recommendations. Rating artists helps YMU create a personal station you might like, accessible through the Launchcast radio button on the left. We like that Yahoo lets you fast-forward past any song, but we found it odd that even with an unlimited streaming subscription, we couldn't rewind to tracks the station had already played. We had to do that manually, by searching on the track in YMU and launching it from the artist page.

Once you've rated enough artists, YMU is supposed to recommend playlists by other users whose tastes are similar. But even after rating more than 100 artists, we didn't spot a single user playlist recommendation from YMU, so perhaps that feature has yet to be implemented.

Service and support of Yahoo Music Unlimited 1.1

Yahoo Music Unlimited includes extensive online documentation via the Help menu. The support section is searchable and arranged into a dozen clickable categories, including a freshly updated FAQ and troubleshooting section. An online Flash tutorial covers essentially the same topics. Tech support is available by phone from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT, Monday to Friday, and online forms are available for submitting bugs and feedback.