All Systems Go!

We all love digital music.  But if all you care about with digital music is having your music on your computer and taking it with you on a portable device, then you'll probably get bored here.

This space is those of us who want more out of our digital music.  Those of us who want more than what's possible today and are willing to do something to make it happen. Those of us who are passionate about music and how we listen to it. Those of us who respect intellectual property rights and think they don't get in the way of innovation. Those of us who stay up at night dreaming about music technology and want to share our ideas with the world. We want to tell everybody about the music we love. We want to help them find and experience music in new ways. We want to shout it out to the whole world. And now, this year, today, the reach of the internet and the power of web services will let us do exactly that.

Stay tuned for news about upcoming technologies that will let you take Rhapsody to the next level.

Comments

[Toby]

This is really amazing guys! My immediate first question is: If we have a list of songs, is there a way to auto-generate a Rhapsody playlist? I'd love to take a random playlist and play it on Rhapsody.

[KT]

Great move by Rhapsody to go to a browser-based model, I think.

Given that I use RealPlayer as my default for most WMP/Real media files within Opera, I'm confused why your browser support excludes the Opera browser.

Please turn OFF your user-agent string blocking for Opera and be browser-agnostic with respect to any advanced, open-standard browser...

[Kyle Kinkade]

oh man this is just great news. i'm so bloggin this :-D

and using webservices? nice. This could really be something. I am hoping that this will be used to work with the functionality of the player itself. I think this would be a fantastic way of making a Cocoa frontend for OS X. (maybe using the webkit framework)? i could easily see myself making the os x "rapture player" client.

[Jeremy Cook]

This is the best news of the day. I've been waiting for Rhapsody on Linux for a long time now. Currently I run a copy of WinXP on VMWare for the sole purpose of using Rhapsody while in Linux. Now I don't have to devote all those resources just for good music.

Thanks, Rhapsody, for listening to my (and others') requests.

[Curtis Cooley]

Firefox install fails with a "Not a valid install package failure."

I'm running Kubunti 5.10 and Firefox 1.0.7.

[K. Scott Rowe]

I've been wanting to be able to buy and download music on-line from Linux for years now. I was hoping that the new Rhapsody would be the solution. It's close. I like that I can now listen with a simple plugin to firefox on Linux, nice move, but I still find it cumbersome to buy music.

I find it funny that you say "Rhapsody Unlimited and Rhapsody To Go subscribers even get a 10% discount on all purchases" when there isn't any obvious other way to purchase music from Rhapsody. It appears that subscribers get a 10% discount and non-subscribers can't even purchase music. So that really isn't a discount is it?

This is a great idea you have going, and I would love to use it more. Please tell me how I can purchase music without a monthly subscription.

thanx

[Doug]

All comments so far are positive, leading me to think they are generated by Rhapsody staff. (See news articles about US teams buying positive coverage in Iraq!).

Point is, I have a "Rhapsody Unlimited" account. Yet it is not unlimited. I cannot synch with my music player without an extra 5 bucks a month. That, actually, is rather "limited." I think that sucks. Thos eof us who ahve subscribed for some time now should have SOME benefit. And no, I do NOT expect the webblog author to approve this post. If she/he does, I will apologize. But it's clear who PAYS the "author".

[Brandon]

Hi, I'm really excited about this new feature. I am especially excited about the future of this. I have a windows based Smartphone and would love to have this service available on it.

I also have an issue. I understand you guys have to run ads, but most sites take the ads off when paying members log in. Will you be providing this feature as well? I find the ads annoying, since I'm paying a monthly fee.

[Steven Frick]

So far on MacOS X, things are pretty good, although the player could use shuffle and repeat features.

Also, is there going to be an API to allow people to write their own native front-ends? This would be seriously cool.

[Sean London]

I think this is a wonderful idea, which would allow me to use this service at work -- the main reason I tried to cancel my subscription a few weeks ago. But when will this new web-based feature actually go live? I have been trying to login but I keep getting error messages and prompts to download the software. The customer services call center (in India?) keeps saying the server is down. What is the point of making the announcement for a service that is nor ready?

[Sean London]

So now I understand that there IS a download required to use this new service, which is counterintuitive and completely useless for me. Aside from that, it seems the download feature has not been working? Hopefully the developers will figure out a way to make this downloadable "engine" unnecessary. I also understand that current subscribers cannot access or add to their current library or playlists? Surely they will work on this issue as well?

[Chaz Burge]

Hey Guys!

I've been waiting for a subscription option for the Mac for awhile now. It's a great start. I would like to see you add the ability to skip around in tracks (back and fourth). Also, I would like to see a drag and drop option for adding tracks to the playlist!

Thanks Guys...Rock ON!

[Josh]

The new web interface is great. Don't have to install the software on my different computers!

Am I going to be able to view "My Library" like I get in the software version? The best part of Rhapsody is that I can put all the music I like there. 90% of my listening is through that feature.

[Jared Leinbach]

I am a Rhapsody Unlimited user. I have a fairly large set of tracks in My Library. I was assuming that once I logged into the web based version I would see My Library and could pick tracks that way. I don't want to have to search for stuff every time I log in. Am i missing something? (the same applies for my existing playlists and custom radio stations). Thanks for any feedback.

[Stephen Brown]

Awsome, this even works through the corporate firewall because the URL isn't some wierdness.

There are a few things that could be make the experience little better:
-a scrollbar is easy to do in JavaScript and would be nice
-add to the queue using ctrl-click is really nice
-delete from queue and re-order queue would be great
-re-size playlist window to be bigger than small would be nice...

Overall very nice.

[bartleby]

First, kudos for finally getting a web-based client that is nominally cross-platform. Like some others, I have a windows box at home whose sole purpose in life is to run rhapsody. I'm now streaming on linux at work, so I'm quite happy.

Here are some problems I've noticed though:

1. authentication doesn't seem to travel well from page to page. I'll have the "logged in" header on one page, then go to another and it's gone. That actually seems to be getting a bit better though, so maybe it's being worked on.

2. sync'ing accounts. When I log in to use the web client, it doesn't seem to know anything about my jukebox settings. That is, it doesn't know my genres or what I've listened to through the jukebox. Yet one instance of the jukebox client knows about another one: that is, my settings, playlists, etc. from one computer sync to another as long as they're both running jukebox. The main feature I'd care about here is access to my playlists from the Web client. Speaking of which . . .

3. playlists. It would be nice to have some options for manipulating a playlist on the web tool, even just the ability to cue a song or album without playing it or delete a single song from a list without clearing the whole list would be great. Also, when I'm listening to a song and I hit "play" for an album (or if I'm listening to a station and I hit play for a song or an album) I get an error and have to log in again (see number 1)

4. share/rhaplinks. I thought maybe I could use share to manipulate a playlist offline and then play it, but when I try to follow a "rhaplink" I get an error stating my OS isn't supported. That's just goofy! Shouldn't it detect my plugin just as if I had browsed to the track and hit play?

ok, that's it for now. Thanks for the really great improvement to the rhapsody service.

user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050922 Fedora/1.0.7-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.7

[Mattox Beckman]

I was just getting ready to cancel my Rhapsody account because I use linux, and had to run the player through a virtual computer, a combination that didn't work very well. The web based version is just what I've been looking for!

[chris]

there are a lot of anxious Last.FM users (www.last.fm) wondering when an API for Rhapsody will be made available so someone can create an Audioscrobbler plugin:

http://www.last.fm/forum/21716/_/44004

[Dave]

Check out this proposal for an Audioscrobbler solution:

http://rws-blog.rhapsody.com/rhapsody_web_services/2006/03/audioscrobbler_.html

[Gary LaVasser]

I want to cancel my free trial. I keep getting as message that says incompatable browser and i can't even sign in. Please confirm you recieved this message and are cancelling my account.
Thanks

[Kathie]

Greeting. I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
I am from Ireland and also am speaking English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: "Copenhagen was introduced by clean edge as one of the skinny opening changes to serve in their 2008 tartan the cleantech revolution."

:o Thanks in advance. Kathie.