Whatever the fate of Yahoo! Music Unlimited, the new subscription service, the bigger story might be Yahoo! Music
Engine, the service client. You get YME by starting a trial subscription, and you keep the program if you bail from the
service. YME might seem like just another desktop media player, but this program and its development staff remind me of
early Winamp products more than anything since those bygone days. In fact the lead developer, Ian Rogers, helped build
Winamp. Ian is running the plug-in development and download community with the same gonzo insouciance that
characterized Nullsoft.
Look at this. It is the YME Plugins Site. Here, you can see the
plugin development work that has been in progress since March. The range of enhancements available for this brand new
client is astonishing, and the freelance developers haven't even gotten started yet. Video playback. Multi-room
synchornization in the home. Podcast fluency, including spidering and slurping. Smart(er) playlisting. Slideshows.
Line-in recording. Unix command lines. New and slick library interfaces. Alternate mini modes (Ian Rogers admits the
default mini is "half-assed"). Yahoo! Search plug-in. An alarm clock (reportedly whipped up by a product manager during
a meeting). RSS playlist feeds (I mentioned
this one yesterday). Library graphical data mining. Web browsing within YME.
It's nearly unbelievable. A major media company releasing an open-platform product in a high-stakes indsutry,
developed by a team that seems to be operating with an eye-popping degree of autonomy and personality. That Yahoo!
mojo is rocking harder than ever.
Yahoo! Music Engine Mojo
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. You do not have to signup for anything to get the music engine if you don't want to. You can also download it for free! I did, I love this. It is sooo much better than iTunes!
Posted at 5:45AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Patrick Sikorski
3. I would love to be able to try out Yahoo music engine, but when I downloaded and tried to open it, It will only open part way then shut down, then try top start again over and over.
I have disabled my anti spyware stuff In case that was the problem (SpyBlaster by javacool and spybot search and destroy by Kolla) and I took all my yaho stuff off and redownloaded it.
HELP! I Dont know what to try next!
Posted at 5:45AM on Dec 19th 2005 by David
4. I would love to be able to try out Yahoo music engine, but when I downloaded and tried to open it, It will only open part way then shut down, then try top start again over and over.
I have disabled my anti spyware stuff In case that was the problem (SpyBlaster by javacool and spybot search and destroy by Kolla) and I took all my yaho stuff off and redownloaded it.
HELP! I Dont know what to try next!
Posted at 5:45AM on Dec 19th 2005 by David
5. I love Y!music engine. It's so fast and user friendly. Big improvement over Napster and all the online music repositories...one problem: I have an iPaq from HP running PocketPC. None of the songs leased from YME will run on this handheld?
Any suggestions, hacks or plug-ins that may fix this problem?
Seems like YME would really take off if only there was a broader distribution network (i.e., ability to play the songs on ipods and ipaqs).
Posted at 5:45AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Ed Gallagher
1. This is quite an exciting development. There is nothing quite as powerful as getting the whole world developing for you!
Posted at 5:45AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Mark Munroe