I generally love Rhapsody’s music service. The price is unbeatable for the breadth of music it gives you access to. Most of the time, things just work. But not always. I noticed the other day, they have an “EQ” button on their software, so I go to try it out. It comes with a bunch of pre-sets, but you can manually adjust the sliders as well. Great, except nothing I did affected the music being played. It didn’t matter if it was a stream from the service, or a local mp3, the sliders did nothing. I contacted their support website, and found someone else had already had the same problem, so I flagged the issue as one I was having as well, and included details on operating system and client. A short while later, I get a response from a Real employee who states the issue can be resolved by running their client software in Administrator mode. Sure enough, if you start the app with “run as administrator”, the EQ does start to work.
Of course this is completely unacceptable on so many levels. It’s a significant security risk in of itself, made all the more worse by the fact that they have a basic browser built into the client, so all it takes is one external link and welcome to drive-by-download-hacking central.
My first thoughts were that it must be some DRM restriction built into Windows 7, but it makes little sense given that the EQ code is coming from the same place as the rest of the client code. You end up having to trust both halves of the same code.
Whatever.
I’ll just use the EQ built into my amp at home, and live without at work.