Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

I'm curiously reluctant to download new programs onto my work computer. Not exactly sure why -- maybe I'm trying avoid distractions, maybe I don't want to clutter up my workspace, or maybe it just seems like too much of a hassle. The latest program mired in this mental red tape is the Yahoo! Music Engine, but luckily, the redesigned Yahoo! Music site (which you can read about here) has given me an excuse to temporarily table the issue, in the form of their in-page music player.

The player hovers around at the bottom of your window when you launch it, and any user (using Windows, at least, given the DRM stuff -- sorry!) can kick it off from any of the little Play icons scattered around the site to listen to 30 second samples. The real fun comes when you have a Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription. After you jump through a few hoops to download plugins and security licenses, you can use the player to listen to full songs from the Top 100 lists or public playlists. While you can't queue up music otherwise, you are able to switch between all of the songs in a playlist when you click the "Play Playlist" button. You can also minimize the player so it doesn't interfere with the page as much (mousing over will pull up all of the controls) and it looks like the Top 100 charts are set up to let you go through the pages of songs without reloading the song that you're listening to.

There are still lots of issues -- you can't play songs in the player across the entire site, notably on the actual song/artist pages, it's reeeaaaalllly hard to get to a playlist page (I think you need to go through Y!ME to get the URL), etc. -- but it's still a really fun feature that is letting me listen to good music without needing to deal with my program-downloading issues, so I can't complain too much.

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