Love to Hate Rhapsody
I've been a paying "Unlimited" subscriber to the Rhapsody music service for a couple of years now. And dammit, I hate Rhapsody. But I just can't give up the streaming access to all those hundreds of thousands of records.
Here's why I'm griping right now: I'm in the mood to listen to the Rolling Stones. Now, the Rhapsody music client is really, really slow on the old computer I run it on, so you've got one good shot at finding what you want before you get annoyed and give up. So I go to the search box (after slowly, painfully logging in for the fourteenth time; 'nother story). And I type "exile on main street" and select "Album" for the type of search. Then I hit "go" and walk away. I walk away because if I stand there I will get really mad and pull my hair out waiting for the search to come back. And I don't have the hair to spare. After doing some other things (work, like), I come back to find the message, "sorry, we couldn't find an album matching the search "exile on main street." Long story short, they had it cataloged under "st." rather than "street." That kind of thing drives me up the wall -- they can't implement abbreviation expansion in their search algorithm? Hell, they could just use proximity to come up with the right album.
So here are some other things that piss me off about Rhapsody, in no particular order:
1. When they have an outage and you contact customer service, they NEVER admit they've had an outage. They always refer you to a trouble shooting FAQ.
2. If you use the web client, you can stay logged in forever. It doesn't work very well and crashes your browser, but by golly those cookies persist like herpes! The real client? Forget it. Stop playing music for a few minutes and you're back into 30 second sample hell until you log in again.
3. Login from the desktop client is a pain in the ass and takes forever.
4. Playing a CD on your own damn machine contacts Rhapsody, logs you in (see number 3), and subjects you to occasional network stutters and other annoyances.
5. Sometimes the client just gets stuck between songs and keeps playing the last few seconds of a track. Man, I hate that. It even does it when you're listening to a CD. And each upgrade to a new version of the software preserves the old problems.
So why don't I cancel my account? Well, at the end of the day, $12 a month, or whatever it is, is a pretty fair price to pay for access to a gigantic catalog of music. And when it's working, it's pretty great. Like right now (I finally got what I want), I am listening to Exile, and after that I may dial up Bob Dylan's Live 1966, aka the "Royal Albert Hall" bootleg. A couple years ago, we put all our old stereo gear in storage and replaced with a laptop hooked up to a nice powered speaker/sub-woofer system and a high speed Internet connection. And for parties, I hook it up to a PA system out in the back yard. And Rhapsody employs some "editors" whose ears I've grown to trust and who put together rockin' play lists or "radio" stations.
So the library kicks, but the software . . . feh. I wish they'd just start over.
7 comments:
My laptop came with the Rhapsody software and I immediately uninstalled it - just looking at it made it clear that I wouldn't like it.
That's way more than I'd put up with. I'm waiting to see what kind of deal iTunes is up to with the record companies. Some kind of all you can eat deal. I hope they still pay me for my sales.
The real kicker is just that I haven't found anything else that gives me quite the same thing -- the ability to go listen to virtually any album I want to, end to end, as much as I want, for a low flat monthly fee. If the stinkin' software was consistent, I'd love the service. It's the gap between the promise and the reality that brings me so much grief.
It actually annoyed me so much that I switched to RockBox, and started buying music from Amazon.
I finally dumped it awhile back and started using a combination of Pandora and my own library. Pandora beats the crap out of rhapsody on the software side, but you can't just haul off and play an album or a song you want. So you have to supplement with your own library when you just want to listen to a CD or whatever. If Pandora would offer the Rhapsody-like listen to what you want feature alongside their "music genome" predictive selection service, I'd be willing to pay around $20 to $25 a month for it. They really oughta do some market research among unhappy Rhapsody customers!
I don't know what all of you are complaiing about as far as Rhapsody. I've had it for almost 3 yrs, it works great and it's an awesome deal. The guy who posted this article originally appears to have an old, outdated computer. That is his problem. He said so himself! Rhapsody is great. I-Tunes is missing a lot of the benefits of this music service!
I noticed the same behavior you speak of when I was running on a 333 mhz pentium IV with 768 KB memory. If you make the investment and upgrade your hardware, it works much better. That said it's kind of curious that what's supposed to be essentially a streaming client is so heavy. After all, it's not like it's doing a whole lot (not supposed to be anyway....).
Another suggestion, try using the web interface. You'll get reduced functionality, but your performance overall may improve.
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