Service: New Rhapsody

I'm kinda surprised by the lack of coverage of Rhapsody To Go, which was just released today, by major gadget/digital music blogs.

Well, we knew Rhapsody will release a "to-go" (i.e., portable music) product soon, since Napster released Napster-to-go a couple of months ago. I was hoping the lag (behind Napster) has to do with Real working on some much better/advanced features than Napster (maybe compatibility with iPod or Palm?) but I was wrong. Maybe this contributes to the lack of interest. Anyway, the underlying mechanism of both are the same: Microsoft's Janus (aka. PlaysForSure) DRM. So I don't understand why Rhapsody couldn't release it sooner.

For people not planning to replace or get a PlaysForSure compatible digital music player soon (like myself,) there is still something good coming out of this release: the new Rhapsody player. Like the old one, it has all the existing playlist/search feature to access the Rhapsody service. In addition, it incorporated our old friend: the Real Jukebox, which manages an integrated "local" (i.e. your hard drive) and "online" (i.e. Rhapsody) library, and supports burning and ripping CDs (MP3 up to 320Kbps! I still remember the old free version of Real Jukebox only rips MP3 to 96Kbps max) Most importantly, now it provides personalization/recommendation capability, which IMO is way overdue as Yahoo! Launch had it way back. With the knowledge of individual musical taste, Rhapsody should really make good use of it to recommend music.

BTW, AP reports Real "giving away" 25 songs thru its new free tier of Rhapsody service named Rhapsody 25. That seems to be a little bit misleading: if I understand it correctly, Rhapsody 25 users could listen to 25 songs per month (unlike paid users of Rhapsody Unlimited, formerly known as All-Access, who could listen to as much songs as they like) That's very different from giving users 25 DRM free (or even DRM-ed) files of music.

Summary: the player seems to be a good upgrade even if you just want the Rhapsody "Unlimited" service. (It hasn't crashed my PC yet >:)