Yahoo! Music Unlimited On Your Treo

Last week I added yet another 2GB SD Card to my collection which brings my total close to 20GB of storage for my Treo – over a third of which is dedicated to classical, jazz and other music which I avidly and regularly listen to with Pocket Tunes Deluxe pretty much everywhere I go.

In recent months I have become particularly interested in classical piano but with little to no time to properly explore and discover new works and composers I was stuck replaying the same ones that I already had over and over again.  I wanted to change this and find a solution that would allow me to:

1. Search and sample as many piano works as possible
2. Provide me with the lowest possible cost for the most possible albums
3. Easily transfer all of this music to my Treo

As you might recall, last year the functionality of Pocket Tunes Deluxe was updated to finally support DRM-protected WMA music provided by companies such as Napster To Go, Rhapsody To Go and Yahoo! Music Unlimited – all of which offer an ‘all-you-can-download’ service for either a flat monthly or yearly fee.

My preferred service has since become Yahoo! Music Unlimited To Go (you have to choose the ‘To Go’ for use with your Treo) which I have subscribed to for $119.88 for one year and which provides me with over a million tracks that I can either simply stream on my PC, download to my PC and more importantly also seamlessly transfer to any SD card on my Treo.

Evidently my classical piano music tastes may not agree with your own but I’ll simply use this as an example to demonstrate how easy it is to search and sample music and then transfer it to your Treo using Yahoo! Music Unlimited To Go.

To get started you will need to have Pocket Tunes Deluxe (latest version 3.1.3) installed on your Treo and the Yahoo! Music Engine on your PC as well as paying for at least a monthly subscribtion to the Yahoo! Music Unlimited To Go service.  Then without connecting a HotSync cable to your Treo open Pocket Tunes and in Menu > Copy From PC Prefs > Communication (select MTP) > Choose where to save music (select your SD card). 

After this, first exit Pocket Tunes and plug your HotSync cable to your Treo and relaunch Pocket Tunes.  This will bring up the ‘New Device Detected’ message on your PC which will prompt you for a driver location (select Automatic).  Once the drivers have been installed you can launch the Yahoo! Music Engine and there you will now have ‘Palm Handheld’ displayed in ‘Portable Devices’ (see below) ready for you to start adding music.

In my particular case I specifically wanted to search, sample and download classical piano works so I simply looked for ‘Piano Works’ in the Albums search box which returned 75 results.  I started listening to each album (you can listen to the full tracks and not only the first 30 seconds once you subscribe) and discarding the ones that I didn’t like while adding the ones that I did like to a new playlist which I simply named ‘Classical – Piano’.

As I progressed in my classical piano discovery process I became increasingly excited finding composers that I had never even heard about (such as Friml, Gianneo and Guridi) and which I most definitely liked.  Eventually I ended up adding over 20 composers from Bartok to Velazquez and over 30 albums (equivalent to about 30 hours of playback) to my classical piano playlist from which I then simply ‘dragged and dropped’ the ones that I wanted to the ‘Palm Handheld’ icon [Note: each 2GB SD card should be able to hold approximately 25 albums]. 

Overall the Yahoo! Music Engine (YME) and the Music Unlimited To Go service work well and offer terrific value for money but there is naturally room for improvement.  Among others I found YME to be somewhat slow refreshing pages, there is somewhat of a learning curve to fully exploit the application, it can take up to 10 minutes to transfer a downloaded album from your PC to your Treo, not all albums are properly categorized with ‘genres’ (particularly for classical) and the classical track names often do not include the name of the composer which makes it difficult to manage your collection. 

Having said all this I have to fall back on the undeniable value that I perceive from having the Yahoo! Music Unlimited To Go service combined with my Treo 650, Pocket Tunes Deluxe and one or more large SD cards – you simply can’t beat an ‘all-you-can-download’ service for about $120 per year.  I very much doubt that I will ever buy another CD or even opt for a ‘pay-per-song’ or ‘pay-per-album’ now that I have such an ‘unlimited’ choice.

Finally, for a ‘total music solution’ in addition to one or more large SD cards I highly recommend the Seidio 2–in-1 retractable headphones as well as an application called Magic Button which converts these headphones into a remote control for Pocket Tunes.

Treonauts always look for great value…