I've been a long time Rhapsody subscriber, from way before Real purchased them. As a big music fan who also who sits at a computer all day, it's one of those things that I simply cannot live without. I consider it the best $10 a month you can spend. And for purchasing music, I love the fact that there is no DRM involved. You buy it, burn it, and then rip it. To hell w/ DRM.
So it was with some hesitation that I upgraded my Rhapsody client on Tuesday. I knew this was Real's first shot at revamping it and I was scared as to what they would do to it given the bloat/spy-ware (e.g. RealOne) that they have produced in the past. I had been a longtime user of Real's RealJukebox 2.0 media player, one that reminded me very much of MediaJukebox. But they ruined it by merging it with RealPlayer to produce RealOne.
But back to Rhapsody... the upgrade isn't as bad as I was afraid it was. Here are some of the major changes for those of you used to the older version....
1. It can now plays local files as well as streaming subscription content. It took less than 5 minutes for it to import my 7000+ MP3s (which are on a network share) which I was quite impressed with and it recognized all of the ID3 tags I manage with MediaCenter. You can edit track info, etc but the U/I for doing so isn't as elegant as MediaCenter and it doesn't have the batch or mass update capabilities of MediaCenter.
2. You can now burns CDs with a mix of local and purchased tracks. The CD burning feature doesn't support a whole lot of customization such as crossfading, etc.
3. It supports a wide variety of portable players (incl. iPod) for transferring local and purchased tracks to.
4. You can store subscription content locally for listening to offline.
5. Playlist Central - a community area for sharing your playlists with other users
6. Rhapsody To Go - essentially a clone of Napster To Go which allows you to transfer any subscription content to a portable as long as your subscription is good. The content on the portable is "time bombed" and your subscription has to be periodcally validated. I'm not sure who this feature is attractive to, especially since only one iRiver portable supports it at this point. I want to own my music, listen to it via streaming, but not rent it.
Thankfully, they've maintained the basic navigation and layout of the Rhapsody client. It is a bit more "littered" now with album art icons, artist picks, etc. but the navigation is still album-centric which I like much more than Napster's and iTunes' track and artist centric navigation.
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Topic: Quick review of Rhapsody 3.0 (Read 2953 times)