The rhapsody service launched a few years ago as a Microsoft Windows specific streaming music service. Over time the service gained what's probably the most complete library of music on any of the commercial music services. This made it a great resource for music lovers. I'm definitely a music lover, and loved everything about the Rhapsody service except for the fact it required a Windows computer to run. I'm a Apple Macintosh user, but I loved the Rhapsody service so much that I kept a Windows PC around just to run it. Fortunately, last week Real announced that they were bringing the Rhapsody service to the web and therefore opening it up to users on Linux and the Macintosh.

The service does still require a small download for the music player, but everything else is accessed through your browser. It even works in the Safari browser, which is a great thing given its popularity on the Macintosh.

It appears that the catalog is pretty much the same as what you get in the Windows version, with the exception that any albums that are download only don't appear. The web based version doesn't support purchasing downloads anyway, so that's not really a problem. I've also never purchased a track from Rhapsody, I always just stream the music so have no problem with the lack of downloads in the online version. So the catalog is good, the site is decent, it works in Safari and you'd think all would be well.

Unfortunately, that's just not the case. The functionality of the player is very limited and has a couple pretty serious flaws. The biggest being the fact that every-time you add a new song to the playlist it immediately plays that song. The windows version does that too, by default, but provides an option to turn off what is to me a horrible feature. You see, I like to be able to browse the catalog and gradually build up a playlist of selections while listening to previous selections. The way it works now, you end up jumping all over the place and it's annoying. So far I haven't been able to figure out how to configure things so it doesn't do this. Given that the Windows version has the ability to turn it off, I'm really hoping a future update of the online version will include it too. The lack of that one feature really destroys the usability of the service for me.

Other problems are also related to the limited capabilities of the player. You only get one playlist and can't save it. So anytime you come back to the service you have to start over. The player seems to stop a little more often than it should and some songs just wont play at all. So it's a little frustrating to use the service right now. I suspect we'll see a lot more user customizability in the future, but today the lack of those abilities is disappointing.

Overall, I'm optimistic about the future of the service. Even if I am a little disappointed in the current feature set, the most important feature of the service is the massive catalog of music and that is in tact. The other features will hopefully come in time