I'm a big fan of the Yahoo! Music Engine, and my subscription to Yahoo! Unlimited, but until today some of the features eluded me...I've been a Launchcast user for some time and rate as much as I can, so the Recommendations YME would send are often excellent. So good in fact, I couldn't understand the point of Playlists - I mean, why bother when you can just say play whatever I'll like and YME does the rest.
Same goes for adding to My Music - since I don't like to download and fill my disk, I have to be online to get the stream, and so searching for the Artist \ Album is just as easy.
Today, all that changed - I picked up a Roku Soundbridge M1001 and turned on the Network Music features in YME.
All I can say is "Wow!!" - the integration between the device and YME is very slick...
- Launchcast is not available (although maybe in a future release), but all your Playlists are just there - regardless of where the tracks are (local or streamed).
- Adding Albums \ Tracks to My Music makes them available on the Roku as well - awesome when I want to kick back to some Pink Floyd
My only real complaint is that the first track of my Playlist fails to acquire it's license - all the following tracks play just fine.
I've come across a couple of niggles with YME itself:
- I'd love to be able to order the Playlist by clicking on the Column Headers (you know - like most other applications), that'd make it easy for me to weed out the duplicates that I've added.
- I'd also like to have an Order Shuffle button - that re-orders the Playlist and lets me save it again (otherwise
it's either a manual process, or I have to remember to enable Shuffle on the playback)
1. There's a known bug with the relicensing stuff that can be a tad frustrating. Y! doesn't handle generating the actual licenses since that would make sense and the folks deciding the licensing aren't inclinded to think that way. If you get a license denial, chances are good it's one of three things:
1. A bad IE cookie. Burn the Y!Music ones, relogin in and try the track again.
2. A bad track fetch. Remove the track from your computer, and refetch it.
3. The track is no longer licensable for request play. Yeah, that's the most annoying one, and it does happen. Labels change their mind on these things. If the above two steps don't work, it's this.
I'll also add that the rentable tracks thing is pretty darn cool. I load up my Zen with all sorts of tracks for commutes, and it makes it nice to weed through various albums before you decide to go buy them.
Posted at 11:19PM on Apr 30th 2006 by jr