Yahoo! Music — One Big Ball of Suck

Alright, I received a Creative Zen V Plus for Christmas. It’s a neat little MP3 player and serves its purpose well (although, I wish I had more than 2GB of space). It came with a card or free Yahoo! Music Unlimited service for one month.

Suckered in, I subscribed. Let me tell you: working with Yahoo! was the biggest pain in the ass I’ve ever had to deal with.

Where do I begin? Let’s start with the free service.

I went to the website and signed up for their free online service (one month free). After signing up for the free trial, I noticed that Yahoo charged my account. It wasn’t a simple $1 authorization to see if the account was valid, no, I had been charged the full month’s price. $14.99. It seems that the free offer actually expired back in December 2006, however Yahoo left the special offer website online.

One week later — after three phone calls and several e-mails — it was explained to me that the offer is continuing, but that there was some kind of billing error. Eventually I was credited the $14.99.

You can’t actually USE Yahoo! Music, you have to use their middle-ware bloated crap called Yahoo! Jukebox. I’m not going to go into detail on why this piece of crap sucked, but let’s just say that I’m very happy to be rid of it from my system.

The search feature was always down/broken. Either you’re unable to search (”sorry, service unavailable”), search results always came back empty (”we couldn’t find ‘Elton John’ in our database”), or the search results shows nothing but broken images — no names, or titles.

Streaming music playback was an absolute joke. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes I was able to connect and stream music, while other times the music would cut out and I would be unable to reconnect to finish playing the song. Of course, that’s assuming you could connect at all — I spent half of the time trying to replay the same damn music over and over again just so I could connect to the streaming server.

My Creative Zen V Plus was advertised as being compatible with their service yet every time I transferred songs — from the Yahoo! Jukebox software — I was unable to listen to them on my player. I don’t know what exactly is wrong, but if you’re going to advertise along with a product, the service better damn well work as advertised.

Licensing retrieval was miserable. I’m no fan of DRM, but at least iTunes isn’t as big of a clusterfuck as Yahoo’s service. Every time I wanted to listen to anything in My Playlist a new license had to be downloaded. Every single damn time. This was a problem, because sometimes I could connect to the license server, but often times I could not, leaving me with a useless hunk of bits on my hard drive.

Generally, I had way too many service interruptions to even consider using this again. I regularly steam MLB.TV uninterrupted and am able to play PC games online without any problem. I highly doubt the problems stemmed from my Internet connection. In reality, this service is just a waste of my time, and I am absolutely appalled that Yahoo! charges money for this pre-beta crap.
[tags]Yahoo! Music Unlimited, crap[/tags]