Introducing Rhapsody DNA and Our First MP3 Player

Today we took the wraps off of Rhapsody DNA and the first MP3 player that uses Rhapsody DNA. Although Rhapsody is often chosen by consumers and critics as the best digital music service for the PC, we know we won’t succeed in making it a mass market product until we also let consumers access Rhapsody off their PC.

To make Rhapsody DNA possible we have expended tremendous effort across multiple groups within Real over the past 18 months. Rhapsody DNA is both a technology platform and a set of marketing initiatives.

At this point it seems obvious that everyone sees the problems with the almost purely horizontal approach that the PlaysForSure device makers and music services have been using. We believe that a successful music platform must specify more of the consumer experience than PFS ever did, as well as the technical components that are used to build that experience. However, we do not believe it’s necessary to build the hardware ourselves or only have one hardware partner. With Rhapsody DNA we have developed a highly specified consumer experience across multiple environments and use cases while simultaneously enabling multiple hardware makers to build differentiated products for on-line and off-line music access. Consider it a balance that is more vertical than PlaysForSure but overtly horizontal compared to Apple.

To create Rhapsody DNA we developed and synchronized four technology areas: 1) Device firmware expertise, which we developed over the past five years by putting our media technology into mobile devices, mostly handsets (Helix is now on over a hundred models); 2)  Desktop PC software expertise so that Rhapsody on the PC could interface more directly with the innards of the devices than it has in the past; 3) the Rhapsody Web Services architecture we rolled out last December, and 4) our Helix DRM.

Helix DRM has been a great base for Rhapsody DNA because a) it supports any codec, format and OS – enabling Rhapsody to be put onto any devices; b) it uses a licensing model that allows certain functionality not possible with WM-DRM, and c) it is Real technology so we can access and modify it at any level we need.The first result of Rhapsody DNA is a new software version that Sonos released last week that makes the entire Rhapsody catalog available to your home audio system via the handheld Sonos controller, without any PC required. (It got a fairly nice review last week by Walt Mossberg.) This was accomplished by creating a standards-compliant web API for the entire Rhapsody service that lets any internet connected appliance securely and reliably browse, search and stream the entire Rhapsody catalog of more than two-and-a-half million tracks.

Now that we've built this API, Rhapsody can be easily extended to other embedded audio systems and solutions without involving a PC at all. The web service API is a cornerstone of DNA.

Today’s news is about how we have used Rhapsody DNA to create a very different MP3 player experience inside of a SanDisk player. Their E200 is loaded with features such as replaceable batteries, a large screen, video and they now have an 8 GB version (Apple's Nano has this now, but SanDisk was first). We've reworked the E200 firmware significantly to provide tighter PC integration and some very useful new capabilities, e.g., it will be the first MP3 player to come preloaded with hundreds of tracks from all of the leading record labels; it will be the first MP3 player to automatically find and download new music based on your musical preferences and listening behavior.

For the first-time, Rhapsody can be accessed from your, PC, from the web, around your home and in your pocket. Over the coming weeks we will begin releasing additional information about Rhapsody DNA, including a whitepaper, documentation, new APIs, code examples, reference applications, SDKs, logo requirements, certification and test environments. Stay tuned for more details.

-- Rob Williams, VP Music Software

Comments

[Jason Dufair]

I'm not so clear on the horizontal/vertical abstraction. And I had a hard time parsing some of the rest of the article (especially since your RSS feed does not have line breaks in it). What will Rhapsody DNA do for me that I can't already do with Rhapsody to Go on my WM5 device?

[Rob Williams]

The horizontal/vertical abstraction point is that we will support our DNA on third party hardware whereas Apple and Microsoft (Zune) are only supporting their devices. However, unlike PFS, we are not trying to support every possible subscription or download metaphor that someone might come up with.

By trying to boil the ocean, PFS ended up as a least common denominator solution. For example, there are very few PFS devices out there which allow you to rate a track on the device and have the rating show up on the service... And what does "four stars" mean on Yahoo, Rhapsody, WMP, Napster anyway - they're all different. There's no way to glance at a PFS device and be sure that all the subscription tracks on the device will play when you go away for a vacation or business trip because each service may have written each track with a different set of rights - that's incredibly confusing for users ... Especially when the devices are decidely mixed in their support for rights management. PFS devices have half the transfer performance of an iPod because Microsoft opted for an abstract protocol over performance because they are a platform company.

I could go on and on but basically we decided the only way to have a great end to end experience was to work directly with manufacturers to have a Rhapsody Optimized experience. You'll see the results of that pretty soon and we think you'll love it. Don't worry, we're still going to support PFS - it's a ubiquitous lowest common denominator solution.

-- Rob Williams, VP Music Software

[Manish Lachwani]

Hello!

Unrelated to this topic, I just wanted to let you folks know that we at 411Sync have developed a mobile interface to Rhapsody Tracks search.

Often you listen to a song at a restaurant or a shopping center or a bar or a club or at any location where you don't have your PC. You wish at that time that you could find details of the song, i.e. who is the artist, what is the album etc. 411Sync does exactly this.

Users can now search for songs from their cell phones using SMS, WAP and Email.

Users just need to use the search keyword “rhapsody” and provide a few words from the song. Within a few seconds you can view a list of tracks that match your criteria along with album name and artist name. We use the Rhapsody API to get the results.

From your cell phone, send an SMS to 415-676-8397 or fire up your mobile phone browser and point to “http://411sync.com”. You can also try it from your PC by going to http://wap.411sync.com. As an example, use the search query “rhapsody pour some sugar″.

Example:
http://www.411sync.com/cgi-bin/search_api?query=rhapsody+pour+some+sugar

Thanks
Manish Lachwani

[Jason Dufair]

Rob -

Thanks for putting that in more concrete terms. Rhapsody is a great service that I've enjoyed for many years. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Hopefully you'll have a "Rhapsody Optimized" experience for my Windows Mobile phone.

[Chuck]

Hey there Rhapsody people,
When stating these new developments you use 'PC' as one of your devices. Does this include a more "Rhapsody Optimized", integrated experience for other OS's outside of the Windows realm?
Also, I have been using the newest Rhapsody client and noticed in the UPnP preferences that you have a option: "all transcoded to MP3 expect WMA". Does this mean that your new Rhapsody DNA files will be able to be used through the UPnP server on devices that do not support PFS? If so, Thank You!