Yahoo! LAUNCHcast: Free Personalized Music

Finding high quality streaming music that’s free is not easy. Yahoo! LAUNCHcast (or simply Yahoo! Music) is far and away better than anything else I’ve ever used.

Yahoo! Music has solved many of the problems experienced when using most Internet Radio Stations (IRS), and lessened many others. This article will discuss the benefits of Yahoo! Music, and how it has surpassed other IRS.

Problems with Normal Internet Radio Stations

There are many problems with most IRSs, and while this list is by no means complete, here are some reasons why myself and others find most of them to be substandard. The quality of many stations is extremely low, coming in at just 20 or 30k, and if you’re fortunate enough to find a high stream it may cut out frequently due to increased bandwidth requirements. There are also the station announcements, they play anytime you change the station, which can be often if a station gets stuck on some bad music, and also can play inbetween each song. Pop-ups are also a problem. If you’re using the music to drown out other distractions, then having pop-ups hitting you every couple of minutes is completely counter-productive. Other small issues can be nagging as well, such as switching between stations and finding large discrepancies in the volume control. This issue is magnified when listening to the music on headphones. In general IRSs do work if you can stand the pop-ups, station announcements, and lack of quality… but why settle when you don’t have to?

Yahoo! LAUNCHcast Song Info

Features

There are several great features with Yahoo! Music, which simply take other IRSs out of the picture.

Quality

First and foremost is the quality. No matter the selection or features, if an IRS has poor streaming quality, no one will want to listen to it. Yahoo! doesn’t display the exact streaming quality, but instead gives three levels depending on your bandwidth, ‘Low’, ‘Med’, and ‘Hi’. ‘Hi’ being reserved for subscribing members (discussed later). For the free version, there is a noticeable quality difference between the ‘Low’ and ‘Med’ settings, but I find that ‘Med’ is only slightly lower than CD quality. The difference is even less noticeable when I’m wearing my headphones with the volume turned down (trying to save my ears).

Music Selection

Yahoo! Music has the largest music selection I have ever seen from an IRS. I have been able to search for music both new and old, popular music as well as random obscure artists. The fact that I don’t have to try and find some IRS with a specific artist by searching Google saves a lot of time and frustration. From Social Distortion to Flogging Molly to Dio, I have never been dissatisfied with the possibilities.

Yahoo LAUNCHcast star rating

My Station

While Yahoo! has more preset stations then you can shake a 10 foot pole at (and that’s a lot of stations), you’re bound to feel stuck in-between a few genres; that’s where ‘My Station’ really shines. When setting up your own station you pick a few genres of music you like, as well as some artists. After that you just sit back, and listen to the music you love. Yahoo! Music will also begin to select songs that it thinks you might like, and it actually works! Of course there will always be the outliers that seem completely inappropriate, and that’s when you select ‘Never Play Again’ (discussed more in Rating). But more often than not, Yahoo! Music has picked music I really like, and introduced me to artists that I would have never found on my own. For those who are even more interested in learning about other types of music, there is the option to share stations. This can be especially handy when trying to find music that’s different from your normal selection. Another useful feature of ‘My Station’ is the ability to search through the Yahoo! Music library and select songs, albums, and artists you already know you like and to immediately rate them. And for those concerned with music censorship, there is also a preference to restrict songs with explicit lyrics.

Rating

One of the best and most useful features of Yahoo! Music is the rating selection. You have the ability to rate Songs, Artists, and Albums in two different methods. The first is a simple 4 star system (’It’s OK’, ‘Like It’, ‘Love It’, ‘Can’t Get Enough Of It’), and the second being a 100 point scale. There is also a feature called ‘Never Play Again’. The ability to keep a song from being played again is fantastic when you stumble across a song or artist that reminds you of nails on a chalkboard. It is also great when you are introduced to artists you just can’t stand, thanks to the occasional fluke of a Yahoo! suggestion.

Players

Like many of the features in Yahoo! Music, there is more than one way to do things; and the choice of players is no different. The first option that I was introduced to was playing music from within the Yahoo! Messenger chat client. This was a perfect introduction to their IRS because I already had Yahoo! Messenger up and running to chat with colleagues at work, so no extra software was needed! There were a few problems and glitches with this player (discussed below), but for the most part it was very intuitive and useful. Now that I have switched to using Trillian as my chat client, I had to find another way to listen to Yahoo! Music. Fortunately there is also a pop-up window that will act as the client, which has also been very helpful (Note: This is 1 pop-up, as opposed to the several pop-ups you can receive while listening to other IRSs). This requires no extra programs, but there is still one more item in your task bar.

Skipping

Another huge boost over most IRSs is the ability to skip songs. If you come across a song that you despise, you can set it to ‘Never Play Again’, as well as skip through the rest of it. The skipping ability is limited to 5 songs an hour in the free version, but unlimited in the paid versions. I have very rarely used up all 5 skips in one hour, it was more of an issue before I started using the ‘My Station’ feature.

Problems

As previously mentioned, there is no perfect IRS. The same holds true for Yahoo! Music, a better solution, but not perfect. The next sections discuss shortcomings of Yahoo! Music.

Errors

When using Yahoo! Messenger I would occasionally run into streaks of errors while trying to play music. These errors consisted of an error message asking if I wanted to continue running the service despite script errors. There would be one question for each song I listened to, but fortunately the messages were nested in the same window, reducing the clutter on my screen. But this might not have been entirely the fault of Yahoo! music, it’s possible that it was a result of other programs and/or settings I had on my computer, or possibly an outdated version of the chat client. Fortunately I have never had such a problem with the pop-up client.

Commercials

One thing that has stuck around from other IRSs are the commercials, although fewer and further between. The commercials could last anywhere between 7 seconds to slightly over a minute. In a very unscientific study I did one afternoon I found that when the 30 second commercials were playing (typical length), they would play every 10 minutes, quite consistently. In another stretch of 9 second commercials, they would be played every 5 minutes. While the commercials can be terribly annoying and repetitive (many times the same two or three commercials are played during the entire day) it was still far less frequent than other IRS, and an order of magnitude fewer than any broadcast station.

Yahoo LAUNCHcast preferences

Payment

While not necessarily a problem, the payment section needed to be placed somewhere. There seems to be some discrepancy between how much the unlimited version costs (Yahoo! LAUNCHcast plus). You can be charged $2.99 a month (billed annually at $35.99, and where they came up with the cost of the extra 11 cents for the year I don’t know) or $3.99 (billed monthly). Although on the television and Yahoo! Music commercials you hear of $5 a month being the going rate, therefore I can not speak to which amount it is. Either way the cost is less than half of satellite radio, without the expense of all of those components. Of course you need to be near a computer and internet connection to hear it. The most important features you receive when upgrading is the removal of commercials, unlimited skipping, and the ‘Hi’ sound quality, which is supposed to equal CD quality.

Browser Compatibility

Only testing Yahoo! Music in Internet Explorer and Firefox makes it a fairly limited test, but still, I have only found success in half of the browsers. Internet Explorer works just fine, but trying to launch the music client with Firefox results in an error saying that Yahoo! Music can not play in Netscape (apparently it doesn’t even know how to recognize Firefox correctly). But since I do not completely shun Microsoft products, this is not that big of an issue.

Song Limit

Possibly the biggest problem with Yahoo! Music is the song limit set to 600 per month. This has only been an issue for me once, my first month using it and not knowing of the limit. I would leave the player running while away from my desk. Fortunately it shuts off after about an hour of no activity, but still not a good use of songs. This could be a bigger issue for people who want to listen to the radio all day long, but for them I would recommend splurging on the $5 a month to get the full subscription, it’s worth it when you’re trying to tune out your colleagues at work. For me I figure that listening to the player while at work (~21 days a month) gives me 2 hours of music a day (averaging 4 minute songs). Aside from my first month, I have never since come close to using up my monthly limit. There’s also a nice feature where the client will alert you when you’ve listened to 200 songs in a month, so you can gauge your current music consumption rate.

Extra (Beyond Yahoo! Music)

There are many features that I did not cover in this article, but a few that might be worth checking out are briefly mentioned below.

Music Videos

If you’re sick of watching 30 second clips of music videos on TLR then Yahoo! Music Videos are definitely for you. With a selection almost as large as that of the music library, Yahoo! has really outdone themselves on the availability of a variety of artists’ recorded performances. With quality I would consider ‘decent’ for internet video, it is surely enough to keep people coming back for more.

100 point rating scale

Yahoo! Music Engine

With a little searching on Yahoo! Music I learned of the Yahoo! Music Engine (YME) which seems to be an installable program to replace iTunes in terms of music management. YME allows users to listen to unlimited Yahoo! Music (with the subscription) as well as manage their own music (Burn\Rip\Play). One very cool feature is the automatic synchronization of music between different locations. Say you load some new music onto your desktop, the next time you login to YME on your laptop the music will transfer (and of course, vice versa). It all sounds very handy indeed.

Conclusion

Even with the shortcomings of Yahoo! music, the benefits continue to push the functionality and features of IRSs. It will be many years before IRSs will have CD quality with unlimited selection, and zero commercials, but until then Yahoo! Music is the best option available.

All suggestions for other IRSs are welcome. Please feel free to post your favorite to help spread the word of the best available free music.