Rhapsody finally upgrades

April 26, 2005

My favorite for-pay online music service is “Rhapsody”:http://www.listen.com/ — otherwise known as “Real’s”:http://www.real.com/ only decent product. It’s primarily streaming, which is a shame, but it’s also dirt-cheap compared to the competition. For someone as spastic as I am in musical tastes and interestes, Rhapsody has been a bargain.

Actually, I should say Rhapsody _was_ streaming only. After _ages_ of only bug-fix updates, Rhapsody 3.0 was released today. It adds iPod-compatible DRMed downloads to the mix, and you can even do the Napster-to-go album renting trick if you’re lucky enough to own one of the three MP3 players they currently support. (Sadly, the iPod is not one of them.) Not only that, but the Rhapsody application can now manage my MP3 library as well, and transfer those items to my iPod — completely replacing iTunes. Which is cool. I like Rhapsody a lot better — more in depth music reviews and a “sync” button that *doesn’t* delete files I’ve deleted from my computer from the iPod. iTunes doesn’t give you that option.

Rhapsody can also handle decoding-and-broadcasting to other media devices, just in case the DRM of the song you bought is not compatible with the DRM of the digital media device you own. I haven’t tried this yet, but if this works as advertised it goes a long way towards making DRM significantly less of a hassle to those of us playing by the rules.

Oh, and Rhapsody also caches the streamed files to your computer so you can even play the songs offline. A nice touch for the laptop, I think.

Rhapsody still has a few problems. The new version makes it harder to see what you can burn/download and what is streaming only. They also hide the prices from you until you click the “buy” button — you can cancel, but I hate the extra step to see if it’s worth it. But overall I’m quite pleased. Which I am sure they will be glad to hear, since I _was_ considering switching over to Napster.

Posted in Technology