Inspirational Technology

Review: Listen.com Rhapsody

I'm a big music fan, no really I mean a big music fan. I'm one of these people who devours music, lot's and lot's of music in all different genres. I have music playing just about all the time. I have a huge CD collection and have been building an even larger MP3 collection from eMusic, the iTunes Music Store and any other place that I can find legal music. To this point eMusic has been my favorite service, since I'm just the type of person who can appreciate the selection that they have to offer. However, last week I finally decided to give LIsten.com Rhapsody a real try.

Listen.com Rhapsody is a music on demand service that gives you unlimited access to their entire catalog for $9.95 per month. You use their proprietary software to access the service, select the music you want to hear and play that music back. The service also offers the ability to burn individual tracks to CD for $.79 each, although not all tracks are available for burning.

The first catch with Rhapsody is that I'm a Macintosh user and the Rhapsody software only runs on Windows. Fortunately I also just acquired a Tablet PC with one the specific goals of it being to access services like Rhapsody. What makes this workable is the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for Mac OS X. I don't often say nice things about Microsoft, but the Mac RDC client is quite nice and makes it perfectly livable to have a Windows PC to complement your Macintosh. I basically treat the RDC client as if it was the Rhapsody software running on my Mac and it works quite well. Of course, I'd much prefer to have a native Mac OS X client for the Rhapsody service, but as it stands the current solution works.

Anyway, on to the actual service. First we have to be clear, Rhapsody is not a download service. It's a music on demand service. This means you have to have a computer connected to the network to listen to the music. For people who spend large amounts of time at their computers like, well, me for instance. This isn't really a bad thing. However if you're the more mobile type who actually has a life away from the keyboard it might not be as appealing. The Rhapsody service does offer the ability to burn CDs, but I'll offer my opinion on that feature later.

For music on demand you browse the collection of music and add tracks or albums to your playlist and the client then on demand downloads the song and begins playing. While you can think of this as a streaming service, it's not really streaming in a technical sense. It's simply downloading the file when you ask to play it and then beginning play before the download is complete. Because of how this works the software does cache some number of the downloads, so playing a track again does not necessarily result in it being downloaded again.

On my Cable modem connection the performance of this mechanism is pretty good. However, all is not perfect and this is where we encounter our first glitch with the service. Since it's downloading each track individually there is a pause between tracks while it buffers enough of the download to begin playing. This pause can be very distracting on some albums where the tracks are intended to play together with no breaks. I first noticed this while listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and it was very annoying each time a song changed. On most albums this won't be a problem, but for people who like music put together in longer forms, like much classical music, it will be a real problem. It's unfortunate that the service is marred by this problem as they clearly have ways that they could have minimized the problem with a little extra work on the client. Starting to download the next track on the playlist before the current one finishes playing is one obvious alternative.

For the most part playing works pretty well. I've experienced the occasional glitch where it seems to not quite download the song fast enough, but that's been pretty rare. The experience on a lower bandwidth connection may be a different thing altogether.

Since Rhapsody has licenses from all five major labels and a number of independents the selection on the service is pretty good. Obviously, no service has everything yet and Rhapsody is no exception, but of the services I've tried so far, it does seem to have the overall best selection across all genres. It's also not plagued by the partial album problem as much as the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). In addition, because of the nature of the service, when you do encounter a partial album it's no where near as annoying as it is on iTMS. Here you're paying $9.95 for unlimited access and you're not actually buying individual albums. On iTMS when you encounter a partial album it means a waste of money to buy the partial set of tracks if you think you still might want to hear the whole thing. On Rhapsody there's no incremental cost involved so it isn't as big an issue.

Particularly notable artists that I've found on Rhapsody include: Wynton Marsalis, Annie Lennox, Doc Watson, Johnny Cash, Mogwai, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Son Seals, Jack Johnson, Coldplay and Mono. Some that are missing that I would love to see added include: Goldfrapp, Evanescence and Lilith. Obviously this is a small set of what exists, and it seems that they're adding a couple hundred albums a week. Jazz looks pretty good and classical is better then most services, but not great (the pause between tracks is an issue as noted), Blues is good for the modern stuff, less so for older recordings (eMusic is particularly strong here), folk and country look fairly good though I'm a bad judge for country. Rock/Pop is of course well represented with the usual suspects missing (Metallica, Madonna). Overall the selection is good, if still very incomplete.

I used to be an audiophile, however, I hung up my golden ears when I decided to trade quality for convenience and move to 100% computer based music. Given this, to me the sound quality of the service seems quite good. I believe the files are encoded at 128kbps, I'm guessing in Windows Media format, but the exact format isn't really clear. All I can say is that I've been quite happy with the sound quality for how I use it. I've mostly been listening through a pretty good quality set of Sennheiser headphones that are fairly revealing and I haven't noticed anything annoying about the quality. It seems at least as good as the 128kbs AAC files from the iTMS and I haven't noticed any major difference with the 192kbs AACs I've ripped from my own CDs. Is it CD quality? No, certainly not, but it's good enough for the type of service it is. Definitely better then any FM radio and better then the digital music services available from digital cable companies. Plus you can't argue with the ability to select whatever music you want and play it on demand with no waiting to download the entire thing.

Even though the service is primarily a music on demand service, it does offer the ability to burn CDs of tracks from the service. This ability has an additional fee attached, currently $.79 per track. With this you can burn one copy of the selected tracks. Any additional burns incur an additional charge at the same rate. The price just covers burning to a CD, it does not cover retaining any kind of digital format file on the computer. I haven't actually used this feature, because I find it to be a poor value. In fact I think the service would be better off without this feature, because I believe it skews peoples perceptions in a negative way. The $.79 per song burn price is a very poor value, but the $9.95 music on demand service is an excellent value for what is actually a very good service. The problem comes in trying to compete with free downloads and this is an unfortunate situation. The Rhapsody service can't offer the same kind of capability while retaining reasonable pricing and in making that attempt the real value of the service can easily be lost in the negative feelings brought on by the poor value of the burn capability.

Other then the poor value of the CD burn feature, Listen.com Rhapsody is an excellent service for music on demand. If nothing else, it's worth $9.95 per month just to be able to preview the full length album prior to purchasing it someplace else. I enjoy the service greatly. I do wish they would release a Mac OS X client, but as it stands the service is usable and a good value. Since I spend so much time at the computer I actually prefer this service to the iTunes Music Store and it makes a good complement to the more eclectic selection found on eMusic.

There really isn't a single service that is perfect. Fortunately, it's fairly inexpensive to subscribe to more then one and by using them together you have access to a library of music that is vastly larger then anything previously available. I personally own ~2,500 CDs, and the selection within that collection is vastly smaller then what is already available in these services, this to me is truly exciting and I look forward to the day when the RIAA finally decides to allow the construction of a complete music service. Until that time Listen.com Rhapsody is a pretty good start and I highly recommend it.