Rhapsody is great!

[coopdog]

My ISP gave me a 7 day free trial to the legal music download service Rhapsody. It's very good. Unlike iTunes downloading music is free but you pay to burn it to a CD, about 79 cents. From there you then could then import it from a CD-r or RW into iTunes then to iPod. It was really nice not having to pay 99 cents per song, when I don't even know if I will like the song after 30 seconds. A lot of rock and rap songs have just the beat or an intro and no the main song for about 10-30 sec into it.

They have about 400,000 songs able to download. I listen to a lot of music just on my computer, so if I can get unlimited downloads (streams) for about $7 a month its worth it IMO. That’s 7 songs on iTunes. In the 7 day free trial I downloaded over 400 songs. Out of the 400 only about 20 are in my 50 top rated in itunes.

The interface is also nice and easy to use.

The best thing about Rhapsody is their organization of songs. Rather then putting a song in just the section "Rap" For a lot of my songs the section was "East Coast Rap>New York" Then you could search for other artists in the east coast style or New York. The "Users also liked" list word great! I found many new favorite artists this way. They also include a paragraph about the band and artists that are in it and at least 3 "Cool Facts."

If you want to be a semi-pirate you could always just hook up your PC audio out to mac audio in and not have to pay to burn the songs to a CD. :)

Overall Rhapsody is a great and easy to use. I would recommend it to anyone that has a PC.

I bet I will get flamed because I am not supporting Apple or iTunes or something but don't knock it until you try it and for those of us that have a stereo hooked up to our PC its a great almost free solution.

[spiraliv]

I won't knock you for liking something not Apple but these types of posts do make me wary of marketing.

[Flowbee]

Originally posted by coopdog
Unlike iTunes downloading music is free but you pay to burn it to a CD, about 79 cents.

A few quick corrections: Rhapsody is a "music on demand" subscription service. You are NOT downloading music to your computer, and it is NOT free... it's 9.95 per month (after your 7-day trial). When you stop paying the subsciption fee, you no longer have access to the music.

A few other things to know:

Rhapsody is a subsidiary of RealNetworks... take that for what it's worth.

The 7 day trial is currently available to anyone with a credit card.

[coopdog]

Originally posted by Flowbee
A few quick corrections: Rhapsody is a "music on demand" subscription service. You are NOT downloading music to your computer, and it is NOT free... it's 9.95 per month (after your 7-day trial). When you stop paying the subsciption fee, you no longer have access to the music.

A few other things to know:

Rhapsody is a subsidiary of RealNetworks... take that for what it's worth.

The 7 day trial is currently available to anyone with a credit card.

Yes I know, you only stream the music. It is still CD quality however. I said "so if I can get unlimited downloads (streams)." I believe they have a deal going with comcast for $7 a month. But whatever that's only 3 more songs on itunes.

Well I guess it's the only thing that's good from Real Networks. Everything they touch is crap.

[spiraliv]

That's kind of lame.

Even though Emusic went down the crapper, you could at least download as many songs per month for a flat rate with NO DRM and NO restrictions.

Now it's forty songs a month.

Buh.

That might be a sweet deal if you could count one month toward the next (i.e. if you buy twenty songs this month, you'll have sixty next month) but I don't think that's the case.

So it kind of sucks the leisureliness out of the whole thing because you have to be careful about what you choose to download and you have to make sure you get it before the end of the month.

So YEAH, now iTunes seems to be the least crappy of all but I still prefer CDs (though the iTunes version of P J Harvey's Angelene sounded fuller than my CD rip :mad:).

oops. that was supposed to be mad but it is happy. i think this is mad >:(

no.

[tubedogg]

Actually that one's sad. ;) This one's mad -> :mad:

Anyway, regarding Rhapsody, I love it. I bought the 3 month subscription before my trial had even ended. I have not purchased one track from it, but I use it to preview full albums before buying the tracks through iTMS.

To correct an earlier post, it is *not* CD quality. It is 128Kbps WMA which, while it isn't bad or anything (no audio problems that I've encountered), is technically not CD quality.

Another correction of an earlier post - while you must be connected to the service to play the music, at least some of the tracks you've previously listened to are cached locally for faster access. I haven't been able to determine if this is the case with all of them, but after playing one and coming back to it later, the whole thing loads and the progress bar is completely full instantly (the progress bar is similar to WMP's when streaming something, where the icon shows you where you are and the lighter bar in the background shows what you've downloaded).