Music Engine. Mojo Engine.
The Unofficial Yahoo Weblog has a neat post on the Yahoo! Music Engine. Apparently, it even provides a Unix-style shell to access your music!
Did you know that the Yahoo! Music Engine (affectionately called YME) supports RSS playlists?
Excerpt:
This is extraordinary from Yahoo!’s viewpoint. To whatever extent things like this catch on, people will be strongly guided to the Yahoo! Music Engine to hear the music, and to Music Unlimited subscription to create their own playlist blogs.
I’ve had a few conversations today with friends from other teams. Believe me when I say, you ain’t seen nothing yet 
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May 14th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
You, sir, need to read this. A bit on the wild side, atleast about Google, but I tend to buy what he says about Yahoo.
May 14th, 2005 at 1:21 pm
Vig, I read that just this morning. I didn’t buy the web accelerator stuff (the net can never be monopolized) but I did dig the parts that you mention
May 16th, 2005 at 8:21 pm
“Apparently, it even provides a Unix-style shell to access your music!”
huh? what do you mean by even?
If they cant come up with a GUI and only a CLI style access…Well than that means they aren’t interested in Linux, which is funny! Why? Even Adobe’s got Adobe Reader 7 for Linux? Why can’t Y! build a software for Linux?
“Well, it won’t, but we did the next best thing. We brought UNIX to YME. Power users, rejoice.”
That means there are no Linux non- power users? Or does Y! thinks that there are no Linux non power users who enjoy Music?
Also, Y!’s rich formatting tools dont work on FF! I mean even Gmail’s work! Why not Y!’s
I am hardly impressed.
May 16th, 2005 at 8:23 pm
“Believe me when I say, you ain’t seen nothing yet”
And probably non power Linux users will never see anything about it???
May 17th, 2005 at 5:48 am
Ankit: Don’t let your zealousness cloud rational thinking.
First of all, you haven’t properly understood the CLI style access – that works only on Windows and that is because YME uses Microsoft technology.
The reason YME uses Microsoft’s PlaysForSure technology is to allow music to play on multiple hardware players. Why PlaysForSure? Because that is the only DRM technology that is licensable and also Apple refused to license its own DRM technology to any other company. Why DRM technology? Because the music companies demand it, they won’t license their music without making sure only paid users get to listen to the music and it is not pirated.
There is no other DRM audio technology that works across multiple hardware players from different companies (such as iRiver, Rio, etc).
Personally, I would have loved to listen to the music on Linux and lot of Yahoos have been through a huge internal debate on this already. But there is no other alternative. This is the reason that no other company has been able to achieve what you want either. If you can come up with a solution that is agreeable to all the parties involved (the music industry, the manufacturers of the hardware players, the company that will produce that technology, Yahoo! and of course the users) , I’m willing to listen.
May 17th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
Ok
June 3rd, 2005 at 4:28 am
Swaroop,
Just out of curiosity, did Yahoo even tlak to Sun about DRM technology? I know we are heavily invovled in DRM for things like interactive TV and video on demand.
Here’s a great idea for you for free
. Why not make the DRM scheme pluggable in the engine? Then Sun, or Apple, or anyoen else, could offer a plug-in to allow Yahoos music service to reach new devices. Obviously, if you let anyone insert aplug-in then you;ld have a security hole, but the simpel answer to that is to require plug-ins to be digitally signed and then Yahoo could keep a list of DRM plug-in suppliers it allows.
August 4th, 2005 at 5:07 pm
Just finished a little plugin for YME that utilizes the open standard playlist format to allow users to share, categorize their playlists for others to browse, view, save or play. The plugin architecture is rather amazing in that you can access the C++ COM objects via javascript in a web page that loads in YME. Neat stuff!