Digital Music To Go - Yahoo Unlimited

Yahoo has officially launched it's subscription music service Yahoo! Music Unlimited. I have been running it in Beta mode for the last couple of months and it certainly offers a lot of bang for the buck. You can sign up for 12 months of service for $59.98 (about 5 bucks a month) or you can pay monthly for $6.99. These prices may not last forever but for now they are the best in the business (and this price includes the subscription to go service......Sorry, no iPods).

The interface is easy to use and the song selection is deep and varied. Plus, Yahoo includes 150+ quality radio stations with the service that are commercial free. Yahoo will also keep track of your music tastes and recommend music and design a station for you based upon those tastes. There is a unique rating system built into the interface that lets you rate songs, albums, and artists on a scale of 1-4 stars. Yahoo keeps track of your ratings and designs the interface around those ratings. When you sign in, it will recommend new songs and artists based upon the ratings that you enter. The more songs you rate, the more accurate Yahoo can be when it suggests songs.

Like Napster and Rhapsody, Yahoo Unlimited provides you with a good system for organizing your music, and it lets you play your own CD's and mp3's through the interface as well. Songs can either be downloaded to your harddrive or bookmarked for easy streaming later. Downloaded songs can then be transferred to your mp3 player by dragging and dropping. Transfer times are about on par with the other services, I think Napster To Go is the fastest because it offers a one step process for transferring music to your mp3 player. One nice feature of the downloads is that Yahoo encodes them at a rate of 192-kbps, compared to most services that offer 128-kbps, so you get a little bit better quality.

Other nice features in Yahoo include the ability to rip and burn CD's, and a feature that automatically designs a playlist for you based upon a particular artist. For example, if you click the create a playlist button next to U2, it will create an entire playlist for you based upon music similar to U2 that you can save and listen to again later.

My only complaint so far is that it the interface could be a little faster, but I'm sure that they will continue to work on increasing speed (the current version is already faster than the original). If your looking for subscription music at a great value, you can't beat Yahoo Unlimited. You can sign up for a 7 day free trial to give it a spin.

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CNET Article