Yahoo Music's geek soul

Yesterday was the PR for Yahoo's new music service. Today comes the blog of Ian Rogers, the former Nullsoft developer who joined Yahoo a year and a half ago and has been working on the product pretty much ever since. His geek fu is very strong (a NeXT tattoo?), and today he lays out why Yahoo's shiny new product is actually a hard-core music geek's playground in drag.

A few of the highlights: support for Ogg Vorbis and the lossless FLAC codecs; plugin support, including a command-line shell plug-in; and support for the XSPF open playlist format (which means, in theory, you can take your playlists between compatible programs, something that Rogers and a few others have been pushing for a little while).

Yes, there's no Mac version today. There will be one later, he says. As for iTunes, "The $0.99 download is soooooo 2002," he says.

"Oh it ain't perfect," Rogers writes. "But neither are you, droopy pants."