Y! Music Engine

It looks like it is a subscription based service like Napster, for only about $5 per month. The software encodes in WAV, MP3, AAC, OGG, and FLAC. Should be interesting to see a new competitor in this market...

Also check out Why You Should (or Should Not) Use the Yahoo! Music Engine by ian c. rogers.

It has also been Slashdotted

I wonder about the quality of the encoders.... I guess I wonder a lot of things about it. I will have to check it out for myself, I guess.

It says you can get FLAC, so the rest is moot.
Encode to your flavor without transcode quality loss.

i dont get it ... the unlimited service allows you to download in flac? or only the 0.99 per song is flac? cause flac aint DRMed right?

Their downloads are wma only. Some site said that their supplier uses 192 kbps but Yahoo's page doesn't confirm it.

http://ww2.nero.com/enu/PR_2005_05_11.html

1) downloads are in full 192kbps DRM-WMA

2) you can rip your own stuff to FLAC, or to OGG, or MP3 or AAC. THen you can upload it, and play anywhere u can stream to

3) YMP "requires" Yahoo Messenger for completely non-technical reasons..

YMP wouldn't suck so much if they ditched the YMessenger part of it.. it'll actually download that piece of sh!t if you don't already have it installed. Otherwise I'd actually bother using the YMP, as it appears functional without being overly intrusive (a la iTunes).

Good to see a major audio app supporting FLAC encoding and decoding. I hope Josh adds a link to this app on the FLAC site. Does anyone know if it uses FLAC version 1.1.2 and also know what default FLAC encoding compression level it uses (or can you set it)?

I am using a Mac currently so I can't test this Yahoo music player which works on Windows only.

<Maybe iTunes will add FLAC now>?

Yeeeah. And Microsoft will add Flac to WMP. Count Real Networks in too.

already done


encoding is currently with libFLAC-1.1.1 (you can see it in the vendor string), no settings, equivalent of 'flac -5'. playback is through illiminable's excellent dshow filters which are based I think on libFLAC-1.1.1


messenger is the conduit for sharing music with buddies, i.e. if you allow it, they can see your library and play from it (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/music/yme/yme-25.html). it's a cool feature but I guess you could argue that it should be an install option if you really don't like messenger.

Josh

I love it.

And so we have yet another music service that's not available in Belgium... sigh...

Mp3.com was sued over this, or what was essentially this, ie their beam-it service?
I remember seeing michael robertson on cnn.

Against my better judgment, I installed YME. As expected, it went and retagged all the files I had waiting in a "bait" mp3 directory. Attempts at resizing columns were futile. After the second Visual C++ runtime error, it was time for the anticipated uninstall. Fifty self-imposed push-ups later, it was back to fb2k...

Not actually. Mp3.com didn't let you upload but instead had preripped copies on their servers which were available for streaming after a "disc regocnition".

Buggy for me, but a noble effort. I have already uninstalled it again after it kept fighting for control of my .m4a fila associations (even after uninstall).

Call me when it is grown up and mature....

And this is markedly different?

COMPLETELY different. Preripped copies would save somebody like myself almost a couple terabytes (FLAC-encoded, at least) of upload bandwidth. That bandwidth might be cheap next year, but right now it's a big deal.. I only get 60GB total traffic monthly.

I think his point was how is this legally different, if you upload the data or if they have it for you?

The bandwith costs of streaming anyones music back to them has to be incredibly high.

Does anyone know if this does AAC Plus encoding and decoding? I can't test this as I have a Mac, but would like to know, since it is using the Ahead/Nero code.

It gives you a choice of either HE or LC AAC for encoding your own cds. I don't know enough about AAC to know if one of those equates to AAC Plus or not.

Tracks you purchase through the store are 192 WMA only, it appears.

AACPlus (version 1) is another name for HE AAC. Thanks for the info!

Although YME requires installing Yahoo Messenger, I was able to uninstall it afterwards and still use YME to play my music and convert from CD to AAC. I don't know how this would affect purchasing music from their store though.

You can also go to the program folder and delete "ymetray.exe" so that the annoying tray icon does not appear (otherwise it stays running even after you close the main program).

All in all, not too bad as far as this type of player goes. Has some decent radio streams in the free mode, encodes to Nero AAC, plays and encodes OGG and FLAC. No one will mistake its tweakability for Foobar's, but Yahoo admits they are aiming for a different audience here.

What is it that these paid services have against VBR files? Even the WMA 9 encoder has a VBR mode now so I don't see why all these paid services should still be offering CBR/ABR files, even though 192k might possibly be a half-decent bitrate.

Could have to do with long standing myths that CBR is of higher quality than VBR. More people believe this way than you'd think.

Well I installed it on a seldom used Windows 2000 SP4. So seldom used in fact, that I had to download IE 6 and WMP 9 before it would even install.

Installation went fine, but operation is another story all together. It starts up fine (although it takes it's time, I think Photoshop CS opens quicker...) but as soon as you try to click on any UI element, the whole window deactivates and doesn't allow anything at all to be clicked. Even clicking the close box gives no response. Choosing Exit from the tray icon results in it completely dying, as such:

http://www.danamania.com/~hexley/yahoo.png

The only thing I can think of is that I'm running it in VPC, but I seriously doubt that would cause any issues (all other software runs fine)

Concept is nice by the looks of it but my god, talk about -rushed-

I haven't tried or seen Yahoo music, but somewhere I read that Yahoo bought Musicmatch and its the basic engine for the new service.

Good News, the AAC codec works with Foobar (CLI support still needs work)

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=34200