Getting around with Yahoo! Launchcast!!

I’m a great fan of Yahoo! Lanchcast & I’ve found it to be better than other free internet radio stations. Infact the ability to create your own station with the artists or genre of music you want to listen is quite cool. 😀 And for this service, you ofcourse need to have a Yahoo! account & Yahoo! Messenger 6 or above. 😉

But there’s a catch!! The free service allows you to listen only 400 songs/month & you can skip only 5 songs in an hour. There’s Launchcast Plus which allows you to have access to premium artists/stations, unlimited songs & unlimited song skipping & costs around to about US$3/month if you choose the yearly plan. Besides the Launchvast Plus doesn’t have any commercials either & song quality is also good.

All this, both free & paid versions are good for you only if you have a high speed internet connection!! Anything below 64kbps will have you listening songs in pieces as its downloaded & buffered bit by bit. Even I can’t always hear it smoothly on my 128kbps line. And one important thing is that if you have a dial-up connection, no matter how fast it is, just forget Launchcast on it. If your dad pays the bills, then he won’t be too pleased with you listening radion on that dial-up & if you pay it yourself from your pocket, then you might find yourself bogged down under a heavy phone bill!! 😀

Now as I said, Launchcast Plus is about US$3/month on the yearly plan & that comes to about Rs.131/month at current forex rate. Not too much for quality music I’d say, if you love good music. But the problem here is that Launchcast is only for customers from US & Canada!! :d-oh: So if you are not in that part of the world, you are limited to the free version only. Still, its not bad, not many commercials. The only problem is 400 songs/month & 5 skips/hour.

Now you can’t do anything about the 400 songs/month but you surely can do about 5 song skips/hour. 😀 If you get a song that you don’t like or don’t wanna hear, instead of clicking the skip button, hit the stop button, let the music stop(which is instantaneous) & then after 1 second, hit the play button again. You’ll get a different song this time!! 😉 And dude, you can do this unlimited times!!! 😀 Sure its 1 click more but hey, atleast there’s a solution to otherwise hopeless situation, right? 😉 And, don’t use your skips at all. You can keep this as backup incase you do get the same song after stopping & playing again. 🙂 But this situation is rarely there, as you rarely get more than 5 songs in an hour that you need to skip.

And for those who don’t know, its only English & Spanish(Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Shakira, etc) music.

Now I wish that there was some way to get around that 400 song/month limit as well, as I usually use up my quota in 12-13 days!! 🙁 Ofcourse you can have multiple Yahoo! ids & use them after one another but that’s possbile only of you use Yahoo! Messenger just for Launchcast!! If you use it for chatting as well, then you are stuck!! 🙁