| My new favorite music service - Sony's Music Unlimited |
|
Tuesday, September 9th, 2014 02:31:30 GMT |
Today, I finally signed up for a 30-day free trial of Sony's Music Unlimited.
It sounds wonderful! To me, it sounds like it might be equal to or maybe even better than MOG* was.
Mind you, I don't have very fancy audio equipment, and have only $30 Radio Shack headphones (which actually sound quite good to me, perhaps for lack of any experience with anything reputedly better).
But, in any case, I'm happy to have finally found a service with such high audio quality that I find it a completely satisfactory replacement for MOG - at least, audio-wise and price-wise.
It costs the same as MOG - $4.99 per month for the Access plan (which lets you listen via their web player, or a Playstation 3 or 4), or $9.99 per month for the Premium plan with access via more devices.
(Edit, 9/28/2014, 8:49 AM: I have to correct this! Music Unlimited's web player is much nicer than I thought it was. I just couldn't see that because I had my NoScript add-on in Firefox 32 configured wrong. Oddly, it was necessary to unblock JavaScript from twitter.com to make Music Unlimited's web player work properly.
Now that I did that, I have playlist-building capabilities which are similar to MOG - with drag and drop - but even better, because you can add or remove multiple songs at once!
Addition, 9:06 AM: So now, I'm even happier to subscribe to them! And I made playlists for my Tumblrs:
Addition, 10/3/2014: Today, I noticed that in Music Unlimited's web player, there's a "High Quality Streaming" setting which appears to be off by default, and deleting your web browser cookies can accidentally turn it off. Which definitely changes the sound, because before I realized this setting had accidentally gotten turned off, I started to suspect that Music Unlimited wasn't sounding as good as it used to. Fortunately, fixing this setting fixed the audio problems.
To fix this setting, click the "Premium User" link in the upper right corner, and select "Settings" from the dropdown menu. Then, next to "High Quality Streaming", click the "On" radio button. The letters "HQ" should appear underneath the song progress bar next time you play a song.)
So, Sony's Music Unlimited is the one I'm going to subscribe to. Perhaps if I ever make enough money, I'll upgrade to Qobuz or perhaps Pono Music, but, maybe only if I can really hear a difference.
(As for Beats Music, I always had the impression it didn't sound quite as good as MOG - and others think so too, as you can read here and here).
I did like Google's interface (though not as much as MOG). But for me, nothing can make up for a seeming lack of top-notch audio quality.
The web interface is definitely nowhere near as nice as the interface of MOG, or Rdio or Google Play Music All Access. But at least it's better than Beats Music's web interface was when I tried Beats Music in June/July.
Fortunately, the top thing I care about is great audio quality, and Sony's Music Unlimited has that. This is the best audio quality I've heard from a music service since MOG.
I tried a 30-day free trial of Google Play Music All Access in July/August, but I ended up scarcely using it because I thought the audio quality sounded subtly flawed somehow, and inferior even in comparison to Beats Music.