SanDisk and Yahoo! team for Wireless MP3 Play

SanDisk and Yahoo! Music team for Wireless MP3 Play

SanDisk is reported to be the second largest seller of MP3 players in the United States, and today they announced partnership with Yahoo! Music which is the number one online music destination! Nice team!!

They plan to implement music services for Sansa Connect, which is a WiFi enabled MP3 player. Users will be able to stay constantly connected to music, photos and friends on Yahoo via a WiFi connection. WiFi is offered by many wireless telecom companies, mostly located in and around metropolitan areas. In some cases, even hotel operators have gotten into the wireless networking area for their customers.

When the Sansa Connect is not connected to a WiFi network, the player behaves like a traditional Flash MP3 player and can be connected to a PC.

If you want the full details:
View the full press release from Sandisk

Yahoo! Music provides unlimited access to over 2 million songs for around 6 bucks, and provides a 14 day free trial offer. You will need to purchase the ToGo option for a few bucks extra in order to use the Sandisk Sansa Connect wireless MP3 player to access the music. Yahoo Music does not permit copying or transferring music files to other users.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited


The 4-gig Sansa Connect comes with a 2.2-inch TFT color screen, a microSD slot for music and photo capacity expansion, and an internal speaker. The unit should be available soon (if not already) in the United States at a retail price around $250. It's expected to be available in Canada in the late 2007.

Create a Digital Music Library

There are many advantages to creating and maintaining a Digital Music Library on your PC. You can find and play any artist or song you want easily, without having to look through a large library of CD cases. Listening to online music has never been so much fun! Even when purchasing online music downloads they are added directly to your music library! With all your music located on your PC hard drive, you’ll never need to search for that CD again. Not to mention the problem of finding the CD case only to discover it contains the wrong disk inside!

Importing your CD collection into your digital music library is easy too! Most PC music players already have the capability to import your CD collection. You will probably see this process referred to as RIP in your music player documentation. Windows Media Player provides the option to import songs as MP3 format or WMA. Either format will work with most music players. MP3 format still maintains higher appeal for most users and is compatible with almost ANY player on the market.

If you are connected to the Internet, the RIP program will gather the song titles, artist, and album information from a remote music database. If you are not online, then you have to type all that information in, so make sure you are connected to the Internet before you start the RIP process. Using an MP3 or WMA file format, each song will take about 3–5MB of storage space. A 120GB hard drive can store about 4000 CDs or so! Do you have that many in your CD collection? If so, WOW!! That's the equivalent of somewhere is the neighborhood of 20,000 songs or 80 days and nights of non-stop commercial free music!

I suggest that an external USB 2.0 hard drive be used for file storage to keep your PC hard drive from getting cluttered. Make sure you have a USB port on your PC before buying. Here are two of my recommendations. Both are high speed USB 2.0 drives operating at 7200RPM.

• Western Digital 250GB WDXB2500JBRNN
• Seagate Technology 200GB ST3200823AR

You can also search for additional models from our online store:

Using a digital music library, you also have the flexibility to create a playlist of your favorite songs! All the songs are RIPPED individually, so you can mix and match as many songs as you like into your playlist! No longer do you have to insert the CD and then only select songs on that CD. Need more cool reasons to switch? There are plenty, but it can also be as simple as searching for one individual song by name or artist. You can find the song within seconds...

And how does all this SOUND to the ear? Well, you can connect your PC up to your home stereo system using the LINE OUT jack on your PC sound card, and then all that fantastic digital quality sound can blast full volume on your home stereo system! As an alternative option, you can simply purchase high quality PC speakers these days that rival the home stereo system! A reasonably good set of PC speakers can rumble the walls enough for most people!

Imagine having all this flexibility just a click of a mouse away, with all your songs cataloged into your new online Digital Music Library!