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.

Bring Back Shuffletown

How come no one has ever heard of Shuffletown? I'm all the time mentioning it to music people as a record that had a big influence on me in the early 90s when I was struggling to find my voice as an acoustic musician after years of playing fast, hard, and loud, but I rarely meet anyone who even knows Joe Henry, let alone this great album.

It was originally released in 1990, but I didn't get it until 92 or 93 when a good friend gave me a cassette copy. Even thenI couldn't find the CD in the local record stores. And of course this was pre-Internet (at least in the shopping sense).

Evocative of The Trinity Sessions, Shuffletown was recorded live to 2-track tape and produced by T Bone Burnett. The sparse arrangements with instruments like mandolin and violin and muted trumpet draw you into the room and into the beautiful melodies in a way that make the words almost superfluous. But the lyrics are, by and large, pretty great too. Though occasionally vague, they're mostly vivid and compelling without being overly artsy or hifalutin. Shuffletown is easily in my top 10 or so records of the 1990s.

And yet the CD is out of print and I've lost my cassette copy! On the Internet, I can choose among a handful of used copies in varying conditions for about $30 (after shipping), or I can step up to a "collectible" copy pushing $50. There's no (legal) digital source anywhere that I can find. Pandora, Rhapsody, Last.fm . . . . Forget it. Every other Joe Henry album I can listen to on these services or order new, but not my favorite! So what gives?

It reminds me of when we bought a five-speed station wagon several years ago. We had to pay top dollar because it was such a rare car. Then when we tried to trade it in, the same dealer low-balled us because it was such an unusual car. Jeez.

(I know: don't tell me about specialized demand and how time-sensitivity creates an over-supply of exactly one when you've got an odd-ball item you need to move. I'm not looking for rational explanations; I want sympathy!)