Friday, February 25, 2005

Artist: Wynton Marsalis

Album: Standard Time Vol. 3: The Resolution Of Romance

His ultra-conservative view on jazz certainly deserves a lot of criticism but I gotta admit he didn't do a bad job on interpreting standards.

RHAPSODY Link

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Service: Rhapsody

Consider this a follow-up to my previous article on online music service I went for Rhapsody's 7-day free trial and they won me over as a subscriber.

Here is a pretty good end-user review of Rhapsody (including a "workaround" for Mac user who has PC) I agree with him a lot and I'm not going to repeat his points here. The bottomline is: there is music I'd love to listen to unavailable on Rhapsody for sure, but there is enough music available to keep me happy. One particularly useful option of its search feature is "View all." Even though an artist is unavailable, you could still check out his/her bio and look for similar artists.

Check out the result of my sampling of what is available on Rhapsody and what is not by using mostly nonmainstream artists/albums:
Punk: AvailablePunk: Unavailable
TSOL,
Rise Above: 24 Black Flag songs
Minor Threat,
Punk Goes Metal
Jazz: AvailableJazz: Unavailable
Alice Coltrane,
Jack Wilkins (1 album only)
Jazz Loft Session
Maria Schneider,
David Murray (none except for compilations)
Metal: AvailableMetal: Unavailable
Death Angel,
Annihilator,
Sabbath (no pre-Dio except from compilations),
Smashing Pumpkins (none except from compilations)
Tool,
John 5,
Exodus,
Impaled,
Shadows Fall,
Metal Massacre
Classic rock: AvailableClassic rock: Unavailable
Pink Floyd (every album except Division Bell but who cares?)Led Zeppelin,
Beatles


Tip for those who are sold on Rhapsody: if you subscribe through Listen.com, you will have the option of quarterly billing, which saves ~$1.63 a month.