Rhapsody MP3 launched with great fanfare this week. Finally some competition for DRM-free music. Well it turns out Amazon doesn't really need this sort of craptastic competition; they're doing just fine by themselves, thank-you-very-much.As a launch promotion, Rhapsody was giving away $10 credit if you sign up for an account, so of course I did. I went through my list of favorite artists searching for gems I may have missed (like Peter Gabriel's Ovo, which I only discovered about a month ago.) And I found it: Jason Falkner doing a cover of Do Ya on a Jeff Lynne Tribute album. Sweet.
So I order it up, and click the download link. 32 tracks at 256 kbps is nearly 250MB. But no worries; I'll just leave it going in the background while I finish up some work. I flip back over to the download an hour later, and it's stuck at 72 MB. I try kicking it by pausing and resuming, but it's officially hosed. No worries, I'm heading home, so I just kill it outright. I log into my account from home, go to my downloads page, select all, and download. And I end up with 22 tracks.
That's right. I am missing the first third of my album. Rhapsody thinks that my stalled download from earlier in the day was a unmitigated success, and happily turns off my ability to get these tracks again.
So I ping support. I try to explain how my partial ZIP file is corrupt and I don't have access to the tracks, either on my computer or on their web site. They send me back inane boilerplate such as "try redownloading the ZIP file again. You should be able to do this through the My Account" and "Our policy is that you can only download the tracks once" (which I take to mean at most once. Apparently zero is OK too). I go through two exchanges with "customer support" over 2 days, and finally give up. This is "support" in name only.
I'm on my own now. I spend far too long looking for a free tool to recover files from a corrupt ZIP archive (why the heck don't all ZIP programs do this?). I am unsuccessful and as a bonus, I acquire a virus on my Windows virtual machine. Fabulous. Something else to deal with. In my final act of desperation, I sign up for yet another Rhapsody account and purchase the album using a fresh $10 credit. Again.
I had an unbelievably crappy first experience. Maybe I just got extremely unlucky. Maybe their store isn't that bad. But I'll never know. I already had a bad impression of Real Audio going in from their craptacular Real Player software, and this only solidified that for me. I do know Amazon. I use them all the time. They have great prices, a great customer experience, and great customer service. So go on over to the Rhapsody MP3 store before July 4 and get your $10 credit to milk them for some free tunes. Then abandon that account and get your music through Amazon's MP3 store.
This thing sucks completely. We've been using Rhapsody for awhile, with earlier versions of their players and now we're using the Ibiza. Not worth it. While the ease of it all seems great, it isn't. My husband got his at a store, it's worked fine, no problems. Mine, I ordered online as the one I wanted wasn't avaiable at a store. Mine: (and these are some issues we've had with other models, but MUCH worse with this one), it wont transfer songs, as the commenter above said. It'll stall out and say it has 13 hours to transfer (from our library, songs we already have in Rhapsody). And it gets stuck on #75 song and that's it, nothing. We've been told it can only handle 100 songs at a time, ok, so I try 45 songs, wont work. This all on top of the fact that if songs are removed from rhapsody, they go defunct on your players, but the program wont auto-remove them, instead, it just screws up how the songs play. Any now mine will play 5-10 songs and begin skipping 15-20 songs, play 1, then skip 15-20 more.... On TOP of ALL this: their customer service seriously, the worst. Their tech's are nice for India, and have usually fixed my problems (the smaller ones) but out of the 3 people I've talked to, 2 were ridiculous, no customer service at all, rude and seriously idiotic. Then, I called Haier, the manafacturer and the woman I talked to, well she seriously hates her job. I ended up talking to her twice and both times, yeah, I'm returning this piece...I'm so pissed with these people, she said I had to have the original receipt, but wouldn't give me the address to send it until I have the receipt, so I get to talk to her more now. Hmmm, think I'll just return this instead to the store and get another brand as this one is just awful. FYI: we've owned rhapsody players for 2 years now and the issues are only getting worse.
Yup, Rhapsody is the suck. I have a prettyr extensive volume of "to-go" music already downloaded on my computer. Would love to just be able to drop and drag the collection onto my player and leave it be till its done downloading. BUt, it usually gets through about 70 songs and then just locks up. If I'm lucky, I can get through all within two weeks or so. Usually though, the Rhapsody player thinks I'm trying to do something sneaky sneaky and corrupts the licence file. Wow...useless and frustrating is an understatment. It would be easier to go back to carrying 300 CDs around with me at all times.
Booh.
Rhapsody gives the artist .001 cents per download, the lowest by far of any digital distributor. Don't support those crooks, use Itunes instead!! Rhapsody is only interested in paying mainstream artists scads of money for exclusive digital distribution rights even though they make all their money off the backs of the throngs of content creators that comprise the 'long tail' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail