Ed Buford - Just Another Geek

Yahoo Music

I’ve been using Yahoo Unlimited for about a year and a half now. As far as I’m concerned it’s better than ever. When I first started using it they were on version 1.0 of the Yahoo Music Engine, they’re now on version 2x and call it the Yahoo Music Jukebox. The earlier version of software was not only lame but crashed often. The new version is not only more stable but has also solved a lot of the kludgy design of the earlier version.

When I first started using it I found there was a lot of music that wasn’t available, it was mainly older music, but more and more of the older music is becoming available, my latest discovery is that Fleetwood Mac is now available, I’ve been enjoying Tusk on my new headphones.

More Music than you can shake an IPOD at.

A few weeks ago Jason introduced me to Yahoo Unlimited. Now I’ve been using ITunes for well over a year and I balked at this Yahoo thing. He told me that I could listen to and download unlimited music for just five bucks a month and that I could try it for free for seven days and since Jason really knows a good thing when he sees it and I trust his instincts, so I gave it a whirl. Jason lists all of the positive things in his blog so I won’t re-hash those you can read them here.

First let me tell you that I don’t like the software. I don’t like the fact that in the default installation it loads a butt load of crap on your machine and then wants to change your home page to boot; so if you install it, do the custom installation and uncheck everything.

It took a bit of work to figure out how to navigate and how to add songs without paying extra for them. Once I got past that I was off and running; I found music that I have been trying to buy off of ITunes for a year. I found albums that I ordered on CD because I couldn’t download them from ITunes. I found songs that I was forced to buy the whole album from ITunes because it was the only song on the album worth having and you had to buy the whole album to get one song.

Since I’ve started using Yahoo Unlimited I’ve found many new groups to listen to because of the Explore Similar Artists feature. It’s well worth he money and if you have a portable device that will handle the file format (not IPOD) you can download your music right to it. It’s the biggest bang I’ve gotten out of my buck in a long time. True the software is lame and needs some real help but I can stand a lot of pain for all the music I get.

Oldies

I spent Saturday morning working at my mom’s house getting rid of a ton of stuff that’s been in the garage for at least twenty years. I found a channel on the garage radio which was playing all eighties music; It was sweet.  I was enjoying great music from the Boss, from Mellencamp, from REM. I blasted the toons just like I would have done twenty years ago. I thought about all the people my age and how this radio channel was catering to our listening preferences. It was great, well until I got a flashback of my grandparents and my parents sitting in the living room listening to Lawrence Welk. It was then it swept over me, this was Lawrence Welk for my generation. It was a sad revelation… I turned up “Addicted to Love” and went back to work.