Yahoo! has finally released the beta of their new music software, Yahoo! Music Engine, supposedly their answer to iTunes and Napster. Surprisingly it looks rather nice, meaning it has a nice, clean interface (read: no ads in the interface), in fact I’m using using the software already; they offer it at $4.99/month paid 12 mos. in advance, or $6.99 monthly fee, plus you can try it for 7 days free. So it’s quite a bargain from Napster which is $14.99/month for the same features (subscription-based access to any music you want). If you have a Yahoo! online account already, it will be used by this software.

They claim over 1,000,000 songs right now, and as I’m currently a MusicMatch user, whom they bought, I notice alot of similarities. In fact I know there’s a signifcant amount of shared code. The download was rather large, around 16MB, but it doesn’t seem as bloated as MM.

Do be forewarned that the installer has a ‘RealPlayer’-like option of installing a bunch of Yahoo!’s other tools with it. But the ‘engine only’ option is a good choice, albeit it still installed Yahoo! IM, as it’s one of the key features in the Music Engine. Not a big deal to me, I shut the IM off right away and the Engine works just fine.