Here’s a look through my DIY goggles of the new Yahoo! Music Engine. It’s not really a review, I didn’t buy a song (and may never) but was interested in using it as a music manager on my PC since I get asked about which ones work the “least worst”. It’s pretty good- supports OGG and FLAC and plays nice with all the wacky devices I have for the most part. The thing I was most interested in was the Plug ins. I downloaded the Podcasting / Slurp one, the Line In recorder, Unix style shell and Alarm Clock- there are many more and anyone can develop additional ones. Here are some screenshots.
Everyone asks, so here’s the privacy policy during install (online).
Here’s the interface. I downloaded a few MP3s using the podcast plugin. Would be neat to share OPML files and Podcast feeds…
Podcast Plugin in action. It also comes with Slurp! which will download all audio files from whatever site(s) you point it at. I downloaded all the 2XL robot sounds and plan to use them as ringtones. Actually, that would be a good idea for a plugin, you drag a snippet or file to a phone icon and it sends it to your phone.
Here’s the Alarm Clock, set a time, pick a song.
This is Line In, it allows you to record directly to MP3 and add to your playlist. Good for hooking up any music source. I tried to have it record a Skype call, but not go. I could see ODEO and other Podcast tool/Plugins working well with this.
You can actually use a command line “Unix-like” shell to do everything, really neat.
One bummer, when it “Synchronized” with my iPod shuffle it just added a new folder called Music. The shuffle doesn’t get its music from there so it didn’t play. I sent off an email to see if this is something I screwed up or if there’s a pref somewhere to get music on it.
That’s all I had time for, hopefully this will help folks decide if it’s worth an install or not.
8 thoughts on “Yahoo! Music Engine review”
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Solid review. The feature set in that software is pretty impressive. I’ll probably give it a whirl. Thanks.
I hope they develop a linux version.
Very interesting, I am going to prove it to review it… worked for linux.
http://total-news.blogspot.com/
http://world-music.blogspot.com/
I get home after a 12hr day and feel like relaxing while listening to a little music. Yet the YahooME loads with script errors making it impossible to enjoy.
Next day… So it loads fine with no errors, which is about 75% of the time, but instead I’m getting error messages saying I am not a member and I could only sample 30 seconds worth. I’m trying to debug it by signing in and out with my password and restarting my comp, and next thing you know an hour passes to no prevail and its time to get some slumber for another day.
The last thing I need is a program that is literally filled with bugs beyond acceptability for release. And to make people actually PAAAAYYY for this? I feel like they should be paying me for reporting all their problems, which have amounted to around 20 emails to yahoo in the past month, which I get a sporactic return of 1 email per every 3 or 4 I send, and that takes 2 to 3 days. Its good when it works, but gosh its not even in BETA but an Alpha release, in my opinion. Yahoo Music Engine really pisses the living crap out of me. It makes me just want to break something.