For reasons I don't understand Yahoo is no longer making the To Go service available unless it is through a partner program. They currently only have one partner program as far as I know with Sansa.
For the price Yahoo was by far the best program. Currently we are paying $5 a month since we got in on a buy one year get one free deal last year. For the amount of music that is available this is an amazing deal. Margaret and I are both able to load up our MP3 players and change our music when we feel like it. Sad to say now if you have the qualifying player and you sign up it is $14.99 a month. This is comparable to Rhapsody or Napster which both have to go programs of their own for the same price. In the past they have always offered a discount for signing up for a year, not sure if this is still available with the new To Go plan. I know it is still an option for the more limited Yahoo Unlimited plan. You can still sign up for one year to get one for free which would come out to about $3 a month. This is a great deal you just won't have the ability to download music to your player or computer.
So what of the program itself. Well I can tell you I attempted to listen to the 500 albums on the Rolling Stone top 500 album list and Yahoo had around 63% of them. This is pretty good I would say. The quality of the audio is very good and the software is pretty straightforward and quick. It works with your LAUNCHcast music ratings and lets you continue to rate genres, artists, albums, ans songs and this is a very nice feature. You can quickly get a list of similar artists for any artist, and get a playlist created for any artist and similar music. All of this works well. They also do a good job of presenting new albums and albums just added to browse through. This is how I pick most of my music. The new albums list exposes me to new stuff and the just released exposes me to all sorts of stuff.
There are of course some problems. The first is that it requires special software to work properly. Unlike Napster and Rhapsody you cannot use a web interface to get to the music. You can of course still use LAUNCHcast and your mood stations, but this is not the same as being able to select a single track or album. The second problem is that this software is quite buggy. Since we have been using this software it has been problematic. I have found ways to work around some of the issues, but often the problem is on their end and there is nothing to be done until they fix it. There is often problems as well with downloading music to a player. I have pretty much given up on letting Margaret download the music to her player as it often has problems. She will generally create a playlist and then I'll move the music to her player. The playlists are another problem. They are setup to be available from any computer running the software, but often they are missing on one to the next of songs that are in a playlist will disappear. This can be quite frustrating since I use playlists quite a bit.
One of the odder issues has to do with the music itself. One day you'll have full access to an album and the next day you may not. I have not run into this problem with Napster or Rhapsody but it doesn't mean it is not a problem. I'm assuming this has to do with licensing issues, etc. but it can be quite annoying. And it can be anything from new stuff to old. For instance they use to have the Frank Sinatra album September of My Years available, but no longer.
All in all I love the program, but because the software has always been so flaky I've not recommended it to friends I didn't believe were computer savvy enough to work through such issues. As someone who does computer work for a living it has been frustrating at times for me and so I can't imagine for instance my mother having to deal with something like this. Still it is an amazing program and the best price out there.
