This post at Slashdot notes some cool stuff about the Yahoo Music Engine. As it says…
Perhaps most interesting to the Slashdot crowd is that the Yahoo! Music Engine is built on an open platform that facilitates plug-ins – both DLL and Web based. Podcasting and video playback plug-ins are already available.
Reference: Yahoo Introduces Competitor for iTunes
Current plugins also add Yahoo Search, some interesting mini modes, an innovative way to scroll, a UNIX-style shell, an alarm clock (jeez, why doesn’t Windows have an f-in alarm clock?), RSS syndication of your playlists, advanced play statistics, advanced music library search, advanced metadata sorting, 2 photo slideshow plugins, Freecell, LineIn advanced recording, smart playlists, a “remote” for Yahoo Messenger, e-mailing music or playlists to other subscribers without wasting inbox space or upload time, automatic podcast subscribing (no need for iPodder), playing your music off any networked device through UPnP, and web surfing.
All of the plugins are available at plugins.yme.music.yahoo.com. You can be notified of new ones by subscribing to the RSS feed. Oh, and if you work at Yahoo, I’ve got news for you: These all seem to be very cool and useful plugins. Why not release a mega-build of the Engine that has most of them already installed? Wouldn’t the program appeal better if it could already do all of these things?
Ian Rogers from Yahoo has a great post on the advantages of the Yahoo Music Engine. Of course, it’s on a 360 blog, so I’m not sure if everyone can read it. Turns out the Engine uses the same skin engine Yahoo Messenger uses, so you can make it look anyway you want.
Considering Winamp is basically abandoned and dead, the Yahoo Music Engine has at least a decent chance at taking the reigns. Its light-weight (six megs), supports any sort of plugins and customizations, and is hooked up to all sorts of great services, not the least of which is the world’s cheapest music subscription service. It certainly doesn’t hurt to try it out.
Some last points:
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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