Rhapsody Releases New Version, Becomes Napster
I made a mistake yesterday and installed the new version of Rhapsody. If you use Rhapsody, I would recommend you don’t upgrade if you don’t have to. If you use Napster, you might like Rhapsody now, they’re practically the exact same program.
In addition to removing a few Rhapsody options that I rely on (like “click play to add to bottom of now playing list instead of playing immediately”) and added all the things I bitched about when I tried Napster and found it much less desirable than Rhapsody. Now that Rhapsody is nothing more than a Napster wannabe, I guess I’ll probably stop using it.
If you’re not a current Rhapsody user, you might love it. I, on the other hand, have years of playlists built up, many of which have “dead” songs on them, songs that were on Rhapsody at one point but are currently unavailable via the unlimited on-demand subscription model. Now, instead of greying those songs out on the playlist, the songs appear exactly the same as the songs that are available, so there is no way to know they’re not going to work. And now, instead of skipping those songs, Rhapsody does the most annoying thing imaginable: plays a 30-second clip. No thanks. I don’t want to buy songs a la carte. If I did, I wouldn’t be using Rhapsody, now would I?
There is now supposedly a “save to harddrive for offline listening” feature, but when I tried that, the song downloaded and said it couldn’t get a license so I can’t play it. Wonderful.
After watching a “updating your library” dialog as Rhapsody ate up 100% of my CPU (and over 1GB of RAM!!!!) for over 20 minutes, the thing finally starts and I see that none of the features that bugged me about Rhapsody have been fixed, some of the features I loved are gone, and the things that made me choose Rhapsody over Napster are now gone… So I guess this is goodbye to Rhapsody for me, and I guess I won’t be updating my WordPress Post From Rhapsody hack any time soon.
[UPDATE: Looks like I'm not the first to give Rhapsody v3 the gong.]
[UPDATE 2: For some reason, the new Rhapsody skips (with a slight digital 'pop') on my machine whenever I do anything that taxes my PC in the slightest. Including but not limited to opening any window, clicking anything on the task bar, and using any scrollbar. WTF]
Tags: Music
May 6th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
Perhaps Real has received enough complaints about 3.0 that they’re continuing to make the 2.1 client available, at least for the time being…
http://service.real.com/rhapsody/download/version2/
May 15th, 2005 at 9:39 pm
[...] grade unusable and undesirable for me. Thanks to a comment by Michael Scott Fischer on my Rhapsody Becomes Napster post, I was able to uninstall that piece [...]
June 21st, 2005 at 6:50 pm
Is there already (June 22) another new, post version 3, Rhapsody update? I got a “must update” message when I tried to connect today.
June 22nd, 2005 at 7:34 am
I would assume that means there is a new version, then. I wouldn’t know, I am a Yahoo! Music Unlimited user now. Fuck Rhapsody.
[UPDATE] A friend of mine called to cancel Rhapsody (to switch to Yahoo!) about a month ago and was told that a new version would be out in a couple weeks and they would extend his subscription for free until the new version came out. He installed Yahoo! Music Engine anyway, which was a good thing, because the guy who promised him he would get Rhapsody for free until the new version came out apparently lied.
Tell me how the new version is, when you try it.
I still suggest you switch to the cheaper Yahoo! Music Unlimited. I think it is already better than Rhapsody and it also has a far far greater potential due to the fact that people can write plug-ins for it and because, unlike Rhapsody, the team at Yahoo! Music Engine actually cares. Not only do they care, they care a lot. From everything I’ve seen over the last 2 years as a Rhapsody subscriber, the Real Rhapsody team doesn’t care about their subscribers’ needs or wants at all.