OTHER TECH

Yahoo Music Unlimited

We've been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since Yahoo, one of the leading Internet portals, bought Musicmatch. In May, the shoe dropped big-time with the launch of Yahoo Music Unlimited.

First, there's the free music-management program, Yahoo Music Engine, which lets you rip, mix, and burn CDs, import and manage music, and transfer music to portables. Then there's the music library of more than a million tunes encoded as 192-kbps WMA-DRM files. Users of the free Music Engine can purchase songs for 99¢ each. But subscribers to Yahoo Music Unlimited - at a ground-breaking $6.99 a month or $59.88 a year (which comes out to $4.99 a month) - can download them for 79¢ each. You can stuff as many subscription-based tunes as you can into an unlimited number of portables. Players that are compatible out of the box are the Audiovox SMT 5600 Smartphone; the iriver H10, H320, and H340; and Portable Media Centers from Creative Labs, iriver, and Samsung. Dell DJs and Creative's Zen Micro require a free firmware upgrade.

When I typed in the titles of a few favorite tunes, I was pleasantly surprised to hear full-length versions from dozens of artists playing one after the other. After "Wading in the Water" and "Grazing in the Grass" for hours, I ended up buying Raven Synom's version of the latter. Music Unlimited also offers Launchcast - 200 radio stations that can be customized to suit your tastes. While listening to the Show Tunes station, I was captivated by "One Short Day" from the musical Wicked, so I bought that, too, and used the Song Lyrics button to search for a site showing the words. That's integration! Yahoo.com