rhapsody thinks i’m a country fan
I signed up for Rhapsody today, because I remember hearing that they had support for a Linux player. I’m always pretty skeptical when I hear stuff like this, but I decided to check it out anyway. Sure enough, they have a plugin that works in Firefox 1.0.x.
Amazingly (and I can’t stress that enough) it worked without a hitch on my Gentoo desktop at home. I signed up okay, and I’m listening to some music right now. I tried it at work though, and it was a no go… everything I did with my Firefox settings wouldn’t take it. Bah. Oh well.
Anyway, I think its a cool little thing. It gives me a chance to check out some new music that I might like, and listen to some soundtracks that I’d never buy myself, but I hear they are good (Star Wars and Close Encounters, for examples).
There’s just one tiny little problem … they don’t have a rating system. That really surprises me, since almost all of these things like this have. So, their recommendation engine is naturally a little flawed.
The first track I played was Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5′. Believe me when I say I didn’t hunt this down (not that I object to it, I like the song and love the movie), but I was just testing it, and it was in one of the links on the frontpage where they were featuring 1980s country music or something.
So, now, my preferences are filled with George Winston, John Williams and Alabama. Lovely. 
Aside from that, I really can’t rip on the service at all. In fact, I’m impressed and enjoying it already. Ever since Real turned things around (their act and their software) with version 10 of their player, I’ve really liked it. And the fact that they are the only of the big three commercial media player providers (QuickTime and Windows Media Player being the other two) to offer a linux client to natively play (just about) all their streams and codecs, I’m darn impressed. It’s obvious that a licensed WMP for Linux will never see the light of day, and don’t even get me started on Apple’s cold shoulder to giving back to OSS. You’d think one fringe market would appreciate another one, but oh well.
So, that’s that. Right now it’s playing some nice piano solo from some album I can’t even pronounce, and an artist I’ve never heard of. I just might have to check it out. Go Real.