Makin’ It Faster: Yahoo! Music Jukebox 2.1 Is Here

Posted by emayoh, April 3, 2007 at 6:49 pm, in Playlisting, YMusicBlog General, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. 18 Comments

YMJ21When I talk to Yahoo! Music Jukebox users, I eventually hear a certain 4-letter word that makes me cringe: S-L-O-W. And, as much as I like to defend my favorite music player, that’s one I’ve never really had a good answer for… until now. On Tuesday, we made YMJ version 2.1 live as the download from our Web site. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re not trying to pack more features in as much as we’re trying to keep improving quality and performance. I can talk about things like fewer crashes and improved performance, but this time I’ve got some hard numbers to share.

I sat down with a stopwatch and tried some common tasks on my machine, from playing an MP3 to streaming a song from Yahoo! Music Unlimited.

Graph

Certainly every system is different, and your mileage may vary. But, I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished here, and I hope you feel it too.

Get Yahoo! Music Jukebox 2.1

As with every release, there are a ton of under-the-hood changes – too many to mention, but I went through the list and picked some other highlights you may be interested in.

• Burner settings now available in Preferences dialog.
• My Music: right click menu items better enabled
• Memory leak in user interface fixed
• Uninstall/Reinstall no longer uses up a machine activation
• Auto update causes no longer causes improper shutdown
• Uninstall of YMJ no longer uninstalls Messenger skin.
• Save playlists in “Playlists” folder by default for MTP devices. Allows playlists to work on more devices
• Improved relicensing of YMU tracks
• Mini Mode YMJ now retains window position
• Ripping a CD no longer crashes when playing LAUNCHcast
• My Music loading enhancements
• Playlist created using “Create similar playlist” works again
• Navigating to the CD plugin no longer causes the playlist page to be unclickable
• Additional checks for album art for transfer to portables.
• Fixed crash when downloading lots of tracks
• Fixed deadlock if you go to the Download manager too quickly

Whew. We think that makes this one of the more important updates we’ve done. Let us know what you think.

And, if you’re into more new stuff, and need something to test drive the new YMJ 2.1, try out my FreshnessCounts playlist of new alt & indie rock for 2007. Let me know what you think of the tunes and the Jukebox they’re playing on.

Get to rockin!

Mick Orlosky

Product Manager
Yahoo! Music Jukebox

18 Comments »

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  1. I have a Creative Sleek. I have a ton of subscription music. What is the easiest way to resynch the subscription licenses and not all of the music? Better autmomation would be preciated.

    I loe the service. My wholefamily uses it heavilly. I really apprecate the fix to the license count. That was driving us nuts as I know it was your support team. There is always things leading to reinstalls.

    Comment by ggaar — April 7, 2007 #

  2. I want to know why this program still cannot remember my column preferences.

    Some things are better in YMJ 2.1, but I hate having to resize EVERYTIME I open the program.

    That is something version 1 should have fixed.

    Also, in My Music I cannot highlight more than one item with the mouse. Please fix this.

    Comment by resource — April 8, 2007 #

  3. I do have to give a complement out on this release. It is pretty bug free and now runs a lot quicker. Thanks for listening…

    (now on to new feature )

    Comment by Sir Cut — April 8, 2007 #

  4. Another version and still no saving of column settings. Why make them customizable if they won’t be saved? How long until this lack of insight is remedied? I’m in pain.

    Comment by trx0x — April 9, 2007 #

  5. My column settings do stick between YMJ restarts in 2.1. Is there a particular sequence of columns you are trying to use??

    Comment by necromonger — April 10, 2007 #

  6. Sometimes I notice a quality difference between tracks. I’m interested in a feature that would allow me to see the bitrate at which a track is streaming.

    For instance, I notice a big audio quality difference between “Toxic” by Britney Spears and “MIA” by Mia.

    Comment by goldeneyes — April 11, 2007 #

  7. all things aside, when are you guys going to support 64 bit?

    Comment by aham — April 24, 2007 #

  8. Any idea when yme is going to use less then 120MB of ram when it’s just running? I have 2.1 if I start yme check the “commit charge” in task manager it’s around 766MB stable if i only quit yme it goes all the way down to 640MB. if I play music before I quit it there’s an even larger jump.

    Another solution that would make me happy is a liteweight lauchcast player. For the most part that’s all I use yme for. I know I can go to music.yahoo.com with ie but it’s just not the same.

    Comment by lart — April 27, 2007 #

  9. I don’t have the same problem as lart: on my WinXP system, YME is only using about 30MB.

    I DO agree with goldeneyes, though, that a way to see the bitrate of streams would be nice. All the music I’ve been streaming lately sounds like it’s at about 64K bps and I was beginning to wonder if this was a result of upgrading to YME 2.1. It’s really unpleasant and I feel like I’m paying all this money for songs that really don’t sound all that good.

    Comment by imnlfn — May 1, 2007 #

  10. The sound quality problem with YMJ is unacceptable. When I signed up for this service the sound quality was high and it practically sounded like CD quality. For the past months the quality sounds unpleasant. Bass is not full, treble is tinny. It sounds worse than my FM radio. I don’t know if this is about version 2.x but the problem needs to be addressed. Anybody have an answer?

    Comment by goldeneyes — May 13, 2007 #

  11. @imnlfn – I just stumbled across a preference that solves the problem.

    In Preferences on the General section make sure your Audio Settings are set to Broadband Connection.

    When I switch it to Dial Up Connection it sounds bad like I described. Now that it’s on Broadband it sounds great! What a relief.

    Comment by goldeneyes — May 13, 2007 #

  12. What happened to the Podcast plugins for YME? Neither one I have (Yahoo! Podcasts and My Podcasts) seems to work anymore. I see no evidence of updates and the links to the older versions are broken. With each new update in the 2.x series this has gotten worse and now it is completely broken. I hate having to use three different programs for my music and would like to mainly use YME, but can’t anymore.

    Comment by dag — May 18, 2007 #

  13. YMJ solved a major problem I had today. I bought some songs from the Zune Marketplace to burn to CD, but, since I run the ZM in a Parallels VM on my iMac, ZM wouldn’t burn my CD. Neither would Windows Media Player or Winamp. Fortunately, YMJ did. Thank you for solving my dilemma!

    Comment by juggaloG_2000 — May 29, 2007 #

  14. Can we get some support for x64 flavors of XP and Vista? From the forums it appears that there are a number of x64 users lamenting this lack of support. Throw us an update with that yahoo!!

    Comment by stretchboy — June 22, 2007 #

  15. Im very upset with the missing feature of the limiter in the equalizer. listening to songs with alot of bass sounds scratchy. And dfx seems to be pretty buggy and works on my windows vista installation but not in my xp installation. Also I tryed installing it at work and it wouldnt let me install saying i had less than 64mb of ram when i had 6gb so i had to go back and edit your installation files internal cfg and take out the line of code which says to chk for your system stats and recompile it. It works now though. But i would still like the limiter and dfx bugs fixed.

    Comment by rhodeder — June 23, 2007 #

  16. Features notwithstanding, this software brought my machine to its knees a month ago, and will not re-install under any circumstances. Repeated contact with Yahoo “customer service” prove fruitless.
    I can’t even get them to refund the unused part of
    my unusable prepaid subscription.
    Corroborating opinions, with similar or identical experiences found here:
    http://mb.music.yahoo.com/music/Support/threadview?m=tm&bn=mus-ymefeedback&tid=2836&mid=4127&tof=5&rt=2&frt=2&off=1

    Comment by jpeirick — July 26, 2007 #


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    Comment by pz10 — July 7, 2010 #

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