The UK’s biggest music library

Yahoo has just launched what it claims is the UK’s biggest searchable index of audio files to help you find music, podcasts and other covetable noises.

The Audio Search is in the beta test stage, but still offers some decent features including the option of constricting your searches by file format, and offering web links to reviews. In total, the index offers access to a whopping 35 million audio files.

It’s by no means the first service of its kind – sites like Singing Fish, MP3.com and Go Fish have offered music search for a while – but it does offer a UK-centric focus on all the main download stores, including iTunes, Napster and Wippet.

Yahoo’s pesky rival Google may have matched its video search, but it doesn’t (yet) have a comparable audio service. While the service’s search options are plentiful, we’d like to see the addition of a lyric search so we can hunt down the nameless tunes in our head without resorting to the spacebar-abusing Songtapper site.

In a fit of musical madness, Yahoo has also announced a partnership in the US with Linksys, which has produced the Wireless-G Music Bridge. The new bridge can stream music directly from the Yahoo Music Engine, but will remain a US-only product for the moment. Linksys told us, though, that the bridge will probably get a European launch without the Yahoo affiliation at CeBit in March.