Web giant Yahoo has officially joined the likes of iTunes Music Store, Napster, and Rhapsody with the launch of its own full-fledged music service, dubbed Yahoo Music Unlimited (YMU). As the name suggests, Yahoo's service gives users who pay a remarkably low subscription fee of $7 per month or $60 per year access to unlimited streams and downloads of the more than 1 million tracks in its music catalog--roughly the same number in Napster's and Rhapsody's. And like Napster To Go and Rhapsody To Go, Yahoo's service allows transferring subscription-based tracks to a compatible portable player. Yahoo isn't a stranger to the online music game, as it currently hosts Launchcast, the Web's most popular streaming radio destination. The company, which has a seemingly limitless Internet audience, also owns Musicmatch, the creator of the seminal audio jukebox and music service. YMU offers higher bit-rate streams and subscription-based downloads than Rhapsody or Napster, but there are a few drawbacks. Still in beta, Music Unlimited is currently buggier than the competing services, doesn't include much editorial content, and has a comparatively unrefined interface.

Setup and interface of Yahoo Music Unlimited

To get started with Yahoo Music Unlimited, you click the sign-up link and enter your Yahoo ID or create a new one. Then you can enter your credit card and contact information and download the software; if you wish to download only Yahoo Music Engine without the YMU features, no credit card is required. You can download only the required components--Yahoo Music Engine, Yahoo Messenger 6.0, and Windows Media Format Runtime--or a negligibly larger package that also includes the Yahoo Toolbar. Downloading and installing the 16.47MB worth of required components took approximately 3 minutes over a cable modem; the entire registration, downloading, and installation process took around 10 minutes from start to finish.

The Yahoo Music Engine application serves as the interface for the YMU service. The Yahoo Music Engine's layout is fairly similar to Rhapsody 3.0's, but Rhapsody's curvy panes and contrasting colors make that application look much slicker than the Yahoo Music Engine's flat, mostly gray interface. Aside from its bland aesthetics and a bit more screen clutter than we'd like, the interface's design is fine. From the YMU main screen, you can search the service's contents by artist, album, and song. The main screen displays new album releases and customized music recommendations based on your personal preferences. You can rate every track; the engine uses your ratings to help determine the music it recommends to you. The main screen also contains a list of the week's top five songs, links to other charts, and a few promotional artist banners. The Browse By Genre pull-down box provides another useful means of navigating YMU's content. Tracks have play (stream), download, and buy options.

As with Rhapsody, the Yahoo Music Engine's integrated music player is neatly housed at the top of the application's interface. In addition to the requisite playback controls, the player displays the current track, artist name, album title, and an album artwork thumbnail. Clicking the thumbnail opens the artist's YMU home page, but unlike Rhapsody, Yahoo Music Unlimited doesn't provide links to artists' external Web sites. To say the least, editorial content isn't YMU's strong suit. Fascinating artist write-ups are an integral part of Rhapsody's interface, and even Napster has basic bios; in contrast, with YMU, you occasionally get a link to an album review, but that's about it.

The leftmost pane of the interface houses the Yahoo Music Engine's main options, including the Y Unlimited tab, which opens the aforementioned YMU main page. You'll also find the Home tab, which opens a page that's redundantly similar to the YMU main page. You can add songs from My Music to the playback queue by dragging them from the My Music view to the Now Playing tab. Clicking the Now Playing tab shows a list of songs that are in the playback queue, which can be saved as a playlist or transferred to your compatible portable device. Maybe we're just dense, but it seems like Track Queue or Playback Queue might be a more revealing name for the Now Playing screen. The Yahoo Download Manager tab opens a screen that shows the progress of downloads from the service to your PC, while clicking the Launchcast Radio tab opens the well-established Internet radio service. The Yahoo Music Engine's integrated CD playback and ripping features are accessed via the CD tab. If a compatible portable player is connected, it will appear in the Portable Devices tree, allowing you to drag tracks from My Music to the player. Clicking My Playlists shows existing playlists and allows creating new ones, which can be populated by dragging tracks from My Music, then transferred to a portable player. The Messenger Music tab takes you to community features.

Features of Yahoo Music Unlimited

By far, the most exceptional feature of Yahoo Music Unlimited is its insanely low subscription fee. Subscribers get unlimited downloads and streaming for $7 per month or $60 per year--approximately half the cost of roughly comparable services such as Napster To Go and Rhapsody To Go. What's more, YMU's 79-cent track purchase price undercuts services, including iTunes, that charge up to 99 cents per track. However, this deal applies only to subscribers--nonsubscribers must pay the more standard 99 cents per track. It's worth noting that subscription-downloaded tracks expire when your subscription lapses, whereas individually purchased tracks are yours to keep. Unlike subscription-downloaded tracks, individually purchased tracks can be burned to CD. Purchased tracks can be burned an unlimited number of times, but a restriction applies: Each track can be burned only six times from the same playlist. In terms of its catalog's scope, YMU is competitive with the other major services. It claims to have more than 1 million tracks in its library, most--but not all--of which are available for downloading, purchasing, and streaming. Yahoo is catching up to the older services, so you're likely to notice that some tracks available for purchase are not available for streaming. This is annoying, but according to Yahoo, it is working on getting subscription licenses for most tracks.

The Yahoo Music Engine's jukebox functionality includes playback of a broad assortment of audio file formats, including MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC. The Engine can also rip CDs to all the aforementioned formats, except WMA, and MP3s can be created at bit rates up to 320Kbps. The YMU subscription includes Launchcast Plus Premium Radio, featuring more than 120 programmed Internet radio-style streams with skippable tracks. Impressively, YMU's streams and subscription downloads are 192Kbps WMAs. That's better than Rhapsody To Go's 128Kbps WMA streams and 160Kbps subscription downloads, as well as Napster To Go's 128Kbps WMA streams and subscription downloads. Because YMU's higher bit-rate streams would really shine in comparison with those of quality home stereo speakers, we hope that the service will soon partner with a digital-media-receiver manufacturer to enable wirelessly streaming its content to a home stereo. Currently, only Rhapsody is compatible with certain digital media receivers, such as Roku's M500.

Like Napster To Go and Rhapsody To Go, Yahoo Music Unlimited has community features that facilitate finding new music that fits your tastes. YMU utilizes Yahoo Messenger as a communication conduit between members. After adding another subscriber to your friend list, you can browse and stream tracks that are in the subscriber's library, but you can't download tracks from the other subscriber's library to your PC or vice versa. You can designate another member as an influencer, which makes you a follower. Influencers' musical preferences automatically influence the music recommendations that the Yahoo Music Engine makes for you.

To transfer subscription-downloaded tracks from Yahoo Music Unlimited, you'll need a Janus-compatible portable device such as the iRiver H10, the Creative Labs Zen Micro, or the Dell Pocket DJ. Other players that aren't compatible with YMU subscription-downloaded tracks can play tracks that are individually purchased from the service if they support the Windows DRM for tracks bought online (the one prior to Janus). Unlike Napster and Rhapsody, YMU doesn't have a section of ready-made playlists that you can grab to go. It's also worth noting that transferring tracks to a portable player is a two-step process. The first step is downloading the tracks to My Music, and the second is transferring them to your player. You can't drag tracks from YMU directly to your player, and each account can be used with two different portable players; a Napster To Go account can also support two, while a Rhapsody To Go account allows up to three. You can access a YMU account from three different PCs. Once you hit your three-PC limit, you can deauthorize one of the PCs to allow accessing your account from a different machine.

Performance of Yahoo Music Unlimited

As you'd expect from a beta-version service, performance was a mixed bag with Yahoo Music Unlimited. After we installed the software and rebooted, neither PC-based tracks nor YMU streams would play, but rebooting again permanently remedied the problem. The 192Kbps WMA downloads and streams generally sounded very good, but depending on the track, the improvement ranged from undetectable to subtle in comparison with the competing services' 128Kbps WMA content. In other words, YMU's higher bit rate is a nice bonus, but it wouldn't be a determining factor for us. Track downloads started quickly, with most tracks taking between 5 and 10 seconds to fully download. 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 burn MP3 and audio CDs.

Yahoo Music Unlimited proved buggy when we tested it with Gateway's MP3 Photo Jukebox, but performance was better with Creative's Zen Micro. Tracks that we'd transferred to the Gateway sometimes wouldn't show up on the player. Furthermore, when we transferred playlists to the Gateway, the music files would successfully transfer, but the playlists themselves weren't available for selection on the player. With the Zen Micro, files and playlists transferred without problems. In fairness, we must note that the Gateway isn't on Yahoo's list of tested players, although the application does recognize it as compatible.

It's a minor gripe, but Yahoo Music Unlimited's database had more errors than we'd encountered with Rhapsody or Napster. Many tracks we downloaded, such as Paul Oakenfold's entire Bunkka album, were missing genre tags. Other imperfections include misspellings, duplicate listings, and incorrect release dates.

Service and support of Yahoo Music Unlimited

Yahoo Music Unlimited includes extensive Web-based documentation that's accessible via the application's help menu. The documentation is arranged into a dozen clickable categories, including FAQ and troubleshooting sections, and is also searchable. 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. Online forms are available for submitting bugs and feedback.

All things considered, we prefer the competing services' smoother interfaces, richer editorial content, and fewer bugs, but we would have to think long and hard before paying double for those improvements. Your best bet is to take advantage of Yahoo Music Unlimited's free, one-week trial period, see how it goes with your portable player, and cancel if you don't like the results.