In its “ready to rock and roll” blog post, Yahoo announced the launch of Play by Yahoo! Music, an MP3 player music app for Android users in the U.S. You may wonder why should you need another music player when the built-in one works just fine, and the answer is – Yahoo’s new app is not only about music playback, it also comes with few advanced features.
First of all there’s the music identification capability which, obviously, works like Shazam. What’s more, Play by Yahoo! Music can also automatically identify a series of songs played in a row.
Then there’s easy in-context access to the Yahoo! Music News that allows you to get the latest news for some artist as you listen. Tap on the “Artist News” button from any song from the “Now Playing” view and voila – you immediately get to access the updated information on the artist you’re listening to right in the Play app.
Smart Shuffle is also cool. Instead of using star ratings and thumbs up/down system, Yahoo’s app figures out your mood by taking cues from your past listening behavior. We’re not sure how this exactly works, and can only guess it relies on such parameters as time of the day, songs you played previously, news you read and so on.
Finally, Play by Yahoo! Music also rocks social networking integration, automatic cover art cleanup, and smarter search through custom technology that auto-corrects for misspellings. The application is available as a free download and you can grab it from a link below.
Play by Yahoo! Music (FREE) [Android Market link]