Janus Dissected

Continued from Swooning Over Subscription-Based Tunes….

Janus DRM (aka Windows Media DRM 10)

Pros:
1) It just works.
2) Per-track license files provide usage rights flexibility.
3) Optionally supports direct download of content from a server to a portable device (such as a phone or PDA) with no intermediary PC required.
4) See the general benefits of a subscription-based approach outlined earlier.

Cons:
1) Per-track license files consume incremental player storage capacity beyond that taken up by the tracks themselves (this is especially an issue with limited-capacity flash memory-based players) and are normally not deleted even if the tracks are deleted. If the option to delete them does exist, or alternatively if the storage media is reformatted, the DRM subsequently sees the player as 'new' when you attempt to re-download the same tracks, and it incorrectly decrements the allowable player count associated with those tracks.
2) Decrypting and validating the DRM results in lengthy, annoying track-to-track delays with some players (keep reading).
3) Trans-rating DRM'd content in the process of transferring it to a portable player is currently not supported. 192 kbps Windows Media Audio sounds great on my laptop with its 60 GByte HDD. It's overkill on a portable player in a high ambient noise setting (and, for most folks, in conjunction with cheap headphones) and quickly gobbles up storage capacity. I'd welcome the ability to, for example, trans-rate content to 96 kbps in the process of transferring to a portable device.
4) No means of deauthorizing a portable player associated with a given track and incrementing the track's allowable portable player sync count. This is particularly an issue at the moment, when vendors' implementations are in 'beta' and folks like me are not only test-driving multiple players, but also reformatting players (thereby deleting track license files) in the process of doing firmware updates and otherwise recovering from bug-created crashes and other unstable situations. Yahoo Music Unlimited's way of getting around this situation is for a user to delete the tracks from the PC, then re-download them from Yahoo's servers, which'll reset the two-player-allowed sync count.

YMU

Pros:
1) Quite possibly the most stable piece of beta software I've ever run. Hasn't locked up or otherwise functioned improperly once (yet).
2) An impressive library of music, even including some relatively obscure artists, along with over a hundred pre-programmed and commercial-free LAUNCHcast Internet radio stations.
3) Speedy downloads from the server; as fast as my 1.2 Mbps (downstream) DSL connection will handle them.
4) Music can optionally be played directly from Yahoo's servers through an Internet-connected PC (which I'm doing as I type this), instead of first downloading tracks.
5) Very inexpensive; $6.99/month, or $4.99/month if you buy a year's worth at once (as I did). That's three months' worth of 1 million tracks of content, plus 100+ Internet radio stations, for the price of one CD, folks.
6) Tracks can be purchased for permanent access, an album's worth at a time or individually for $0.79 each.
7) High quality 192 kbps Windows Media Audio encoding for downloads, and 128 kbps WMA for streams.
After download, tracks are also playable in Windows Media Player on the PC, which has a superior feature set (SRS Labs Wow audio processing, graphic EQ, dynamic range control, etc).
9) An intuitive user interface (the equal, in my opinion, of that in iTunes), with easy-to-create playlists and excellent suggestions on other artists, albums and tracks I might be interested in. Nice visualizations. Supports plug-ins and skins.
10) Absolutely no glitches to date on anything I've streamed from Yahoo's servers. I wish Sirius Radio Online (which, I'll note, runs at 32 kbps, one-fourth the bitrate of Yahoo Music streaming content) worked as well.

Cons:
1) Not all artists I surveyed are currently represented, even some fairly well-known ones (AC/DC, Ani DiFranco, Jerry Garcia, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, Ratdog, Sound Tribe Sector Nine, the Songcatcher soundtrack, etc) are missing or unavailable.
2) Not all genres are currently represented; classical music is one notable omission, for example.
3) Not all albums, for represented artists, are offered.
4) In some cases, one or a few tracks off an album are not available for purchase, subscription access, or both. Not a big deal for folks who take their music a track at a time, but irritating for purists like me (who like to listen to albums straight through as the artist originally intended). Also irritating when listening to live concert material.
5) Doesn't cleanly interoperate with Windows Media Player. Content played in the Yahoo Music Engine (even stuff streamed from Yahoo's servers) automatically gets added to the Windows Music Player library (even though I have the 'add music files to library when played' option deselected in Windows Media Player), rapidly cluttering it. If I delete tracks within the Yahoo Music Engine, they don't automatically disappear from Windows Media Player's library, and visa versa.
6) No Linux or Mac OS X support. Requires Windows XP, won't run on prior-generation Windows O/Ss.
7) Also auto-installs Yahoo Messenger, for 'community'-related functions that I didn't try out (easily, subsequently deinstalled, which I did).
Deleting content doesn't auto-delete the corresponding playlist, and visa versa.
9) Occasional incomplete track downloads due to server-side timeouts or disconnects. Easy to continue-or-restart and complete, however.
10) Although WMA is the format used for both streaming and downloaded audio content, it is not a supported option for ripping audio from CDs in the Yahoo Music Engine (which supports MP3, AAC, WAV, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC). This to me is incredibly bizarre, especially given that the Windows Media Encoder is a free download from Microsoft's website.

Continued with Player Opinions….