Service: Yahoo Music Unlimited to go

If you've read my previous post, you know I have switched to Yahoo Music Unlimited to go from Real Rhapsody. Price-wise there is no comparison: the recently raised yearly rate for Rhapsody is $119.88. How much does Yahoo cost yearly? $71.88!!! And if you pay with MasterCard, you get the 2nd year free! So I do myself a favor and "upgrade" to the "to go" version, which is $143.88 (for 2 years since I took advantage of the MC deal) and it is still cheaper than Rhapsody!

So what do I have to "give up" by switching? 2 Million songs. (According to Rhapsody, their catalog has 4 mil while Yahoo claim they have 2 mil) Though what really matter the most to me is the loss in classical music. A significant portion of the comprehensive catalog of the budget classical label, Naxos, is available on Rhapsody but not on Yahoo. Don't get me wrong: You could still find a lot of classical music on Yahoo. In fact, I bet the "Top 40" major classical works are there. However, the selection is just too "limited" for serious classical music fan.

What other complaints do I have? Buggy software! Although Real is not known for writing solid software (maybe Listen.com did a real good job and the core was retained?), the Rhapsody client is far more stable and responsive than Yahoo's Music Jukebox (YMJ) during my 2 years stint with them. In contrast, YMJ crashes often and has some weird bugs (e.g. sometimes after playing the 1st song on the playlist, it appeared to move on to the next but actually repeated the 1st one) And when it behaves normally, it feels very sluggish : slow to display contents (e.g. contents on portable devices, artist/album/playlist pages) BTW, unlike Rhapsody, it does not support Windows 2000. (It used to. I wonder why it does not anymore)

The user experience for transferring songs also leaves a lot to be desired. First of all, just like Napster, it is a very slow process, probably due to the overhead of handling DRM. For example, transferring ~720Mb (~100 songs) of music to my Samsung Yepp player took almost an hour! So this is more suitable to be performed in "batch" mode (i.e. before I go to bed!) However, the software is not really well suited to run in this mode either. Let's say I dragged a list of 100 songs to a portable player, the following happens:
Phase 1: it will try to download the 100 songs from its server to my PC
Phase 2: it will try to copy the songs from my PC to the portable.
During Phase 1, if it encounters a previously downloaded song, it will pop up a message and ask if I want to re-download. It will sit there and do nothing until I respond! (What it should have done is comparing the checksum of the local and remote file to determine whether re-downloading is necessary!)
Before Phase 2 begins, if it encouters any error during Phase 1, it will pop up a message saying there were errors. Again, it will not do anything until I acknowledge!

Nevertheless, besides being less expensive, it does have its virtues:
1) higher bit rate: I believe Rhapsody serves music at 160kbps while Yahoo does 192! (I will have to perform some serious A/B testing to tell if the higher bit rate translates to higher sound quality though)
2) better recommendations: I praised Napster for this. Yahoo is also superior to Rhapsody in this regard. My rating of artists/songs/albums/genres affects Yahoo's recommendation. And I could break it down by genre so I could build playlist that have exactly the right balance of different genres. (I know this is weird but sometimes I do insist on 40% jazz, 40% classical and 20% metal!) Unfortunately, Yahoo did not take it to the next level, i.e., utilizing recommendation to enhance portable music experience. What it should have done is supporting smart playlists determined by genre or similar artists, when the songs were played last time and the total size. And it should allow "real" sychronization of such playlists to portables(i.e., keep songs on the player and in the playlist, remove the rest and finally add missing ones) The current so-called sychronization barks when there is not enough space on the player. Also, I couldn't rate music on my portable and "feed" the ratings back to YMJ. I guess it is challenging to support such feature across many players from different manufacturers, unlike Apple only needs to deal with iPods (and iPhones now)

Finally, even though it does not show on Yahoo's compatibility list, I am able to transfer and listen on my Dell Axim x30 (running Windows Mobile 2003 SE) The transfer speed is even worse than my Yepp though. (It probably has to do with Axim's SD card hardware) What a pleasant surprise!

Service: Goodbye Rhapsody. Hello Yahoo Music

I've been a subscriber of Real Rhapsody ever since I started this blog but all good things come to an end. It's time for me to cancel my subscription. There was only one reason: rate hike. I have been paying the quarterly rate of $24.95 and now Real has raised it to $34.99.

And the cancellation experience was not without pain: I had to call them (couldn't do this online) and was put on hold for 20 mins until I was able to talk to a customer service rep, who kept trying to convince me to stay with reasons like it is the first time in six years that they have increased the price of Rhapsody (which I don't really care) I had to be very firm about the cancellation to finally get it cancelled. And I will check my credit card bill very carefully for sure.

Stay tuned for my review of Yahoo Music Unlimited!