Hyper Gumbo » rhapsody

Real Fail

Don — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:13:24 +0000

You’d think the people who work at Real Networks would treat the only division that actually has a future, Rhapsody, with a little respect. They are the only part of the company that has any sort of potential for revenue and profit these days. And yet they managed to release an update that completely breaks the Rhapsody client. That means they literally didn’t do a single smoke test on the product before release. Talk about a massive display of incompetence. If I worked in QA at Real networks, I’d be polishing my resume, because I would know I deserve to be fired. I mean for crimmeny’s sake, you just days ago announced your big acquisition and transition for all the Napster people, and you break your own product during that critical getting-to-know-the-new-guys phase. You might as well have poured all the money you spent on the Best Buy customers down the drain for all the goodwill you’ve wasted.

The Fratellis – Costello Music

Don — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:41:12 +0000

I think the album title caught my eye in a is-this-an-album-of-elvis-costello-covers-i-see sort of way, and on Rhapsody, all the music is ‘free’, so download I did, without bothering to look beyond the track titles enough to see they weren’t Elvis songs. Turns out to be a fairly decent rock album, very peppy and energetic, without a single song skipped so far, and every one a toe-tapper even on first listen.

Recommended – Costello Music

How important is that EQ to you?

Don — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:13:29 +0000

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.

The eMusic party is finally over

Don — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 16:46:05 +0000

With the addition of UMG, eMusic draws their life as the alternative-little-guy-tries-to-be-good to an end. Gone are the simple to use credit-per-track subscription models. In their place is a credit-as-currency-that-you-can-lose model. It certainly places them in an odd position. Their value differentiation is gone. There’s no benefit to being a subscriber to emusic; you’re better off spending your money as you want to via amazon’s mp3 store. There’s nothing that emusic has exclusive control over, and now they aren’t any cheaper. I put my account on a 90 day hold; hopefully before the 90 days is up, their revenue stream will have suffered enough that they decide to ditch UMG altogether, and go back to indie-land where they can thrive. Rhapsody still rocks.

Remembering Michael

Don — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:01:19 +0000

A tortured and troubled life. I can remember a time when preachers used to use him as a role model. I was once told a story about him appearing somewhere with the Jackson 5 as a teenager, and some music bigwig offered him money for sex. He turned it down, and the guy says something about how it’d be different if only he were a woman, and Michael reportedly replied that he was saving himself for marriage. Then the Pepsi fire happened, and he was never really the same.
Frankly, I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did, in a world where, from the age of 8, he was surrounded by people who saw him as a golden goose, to be fattened and flattered. The golden goose is dead, long live the golden eggs he has laid.

As I stream the Jackson Family tribute playlist, I can’t help but wonder who’s going to make out from the cash windfall that Michael nostalgia will bring. Maybe we could build the statue from HIStory as an economic booster program.

Poor Taste or Wicked Sense of Humor?

Don — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:31:15 +0000

Michael Jackson was a part of "music's most riveting romances"?

Paul Simon, Back on Rhapsody (updated)

Don — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:48:31 +0000

Seems someone in charge of Paul’s music didn’t like getting paid for people listening to it, and had it removed from the Rhapsody music service. What a moron. Now I won’t buy any new Paul Simon music, ever again until he gets a new manager.

What a brilliant strategy to maximize your client’s value, by removing a revenue stream for him, I’m sure he’ll totally give you a bonus during these tough economic times.

UPDATE: strike thru above, and an amused note that they didn’t pull any of the covers, and it turns out both the US Navy Band Sea Chanters Chorus, and the “Studio Group”, manage to pull of perfectly listenable covers. So congrats mister manager, you’ve deprived paul of only some of his revenue; he’ll still get the statutory minimum payment for a cover song. You cost him something, but not everything.

UPDATE2: Mr Myers version wasn’t bad, but didn’t finish it. The mostly instrumental jazzy one by Common Ground is getting a full listen. The Soweto String Quartet is quite up beat by the end. It’ll get a second listen, I think.

UPDATE3: Paul Simon is back on Rhapsody, joy =)

About That Rhapsody Love…

Don — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:26:14 +0000

I take it back.

Not all of it; I still think it’s the best deal out there for subscription music. But someone made a bit of a goof recently, and broke track search. It used to be, if you searched for the song “crazy”, by track title, you’d find lots of songs with that title. Now, it only returns tracks with at least 2 words in the title, at least on the first page. It reminds me of having to point out to someone, the existance of the group “u2″, when they said “there aren’t any bands shorter than 3 letters”, when justifying a coding mistake he’d made.