The Rhapsody Blog (blog.rhapsody.com) is a worthy follow for fans of music and Rhapsody. One of the nice things is that they give away music just about every day in the form of contests and free downloads. The last three free downloads are Poison’s - “Every Rose Has it’s Thorns”, Whitesnake - “Here we go” and Green Days’ new single - “Know Your Enemy”. Here is the link of the free mp3 downloads - go there now http://blog.rhapsody.com/rhapsodys-song-of-the-day/

It was bound to happen, but Rhapsody finally launched a DRM Free MP3 store and integrating the DRM Free MP3s into the Rhapsody Jukebox. So, what does this mean?
- If you have a Rhapsody membership (subscription) you can listen to full songs as much as you want and buy songs for $.99 that work on any MP3 player including iPods.
- If you don’t have a Rhapsody membership, you can still listen to up to 25 song streams per month and buy DRM free songs for $.99 or $9.99 for the album.
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I just posted a “How To” on creating and sharing a playlist using Rhapsody. You can find it on the left hand navigation of links or click here to learn how to create and share a playlist. Enjoy!

The British Alt band Radiohead has finally released their catalog to Rhapsody for streaming and downloading. This is great news for Radiohead fans and Rhapsody subscribers as now you can explore their entire catalog and listen to any complete song as much as you want if you are a Rhapsody subscriber. I’ve heard a few Radiohead songs on the radio, but never been a true devotee’. I just listened to their greatest hits “The Best Of” and found quite a few that I really enjoy such as “Just”, “High and Dry” and “Lucky”.

Here is a complete list of albums from Radiohead on Rhapsody. Each Radiohead album has a review from a Rhapsody Editor. Try finding THAT on Napster or iTunes.
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I’ve been playing with the new search box on Rhapsody.com which was launched in December and I must say it is vastly improved over the previous search experience. Two big changes:
1) two new drop down categories have been added - By Lyrics and By Video.
2) the search results display as you type out the letters. For example if you type inn Dan it shows all the artists that start with dan - as you type in more letters it gets closer to what you need.
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A 3 or 6 month subscription to Rhapsody makes a great stocking stuffer or send item for those far away music lovers. Both Rhapsody Unlimited and Rhapsody To Go (transfer tracks to your MP3 player) are available as well as a download pack of 50 songs for $34.99 - that’s $.70 per track for those of you who are math impared :-).

Click here to see the gift subscription options on Rhapsody

Rhapsody announced in October that the music service will be available to TiVO subscribers through their DVRs. This is like taking all of the 800 poorly programmed stations on channels 900 - 999 and replacing them with a library of 6,000,000+ full songs, 750,000+ albums, 100’s of good channels and playlists that you choose. This is great for both Rhapsody who gets the service in front of millions of TiVO owners and TiVO who adds a really great option to their DVR.

Here’s a screenshot of the TiVo menu with Rhapsody:. Notice how it is built seamlessly into the TiVo interface.
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On Nov 1, RollingStone launched it’s first full digital edition. This is pretty cool because they have never put ALL of their articles, reviews, etc. from a single edition online. It is a very interesting combination of words and the ability to hear the songs immediately through Rhapsody Online. If you go to the Charts page (pg. 212), you can listen to most all of the tracks and albums that are on this page. Click here to go to the digital version of 40 years of RollingStone.com

Overall, I like the integration of content and music. However I have some issues with the viewer they are using and how difficult it is to read. Literally, they have re-created all the pages of the magazine in a viewer format. Same pages, same size, same delivery. While kind of cool, it doesn’t work as well as using dynamic web pages and formating the content for the web. There is not an easy way to skip large chunks of pages, the resolution is not great when the entire page is in the viewer and even when expanded to be readeable - it’s not very condusive to browsing and linking. I think they need to ditch this viewer format and figure out a way to integrate the content into the web browser with the same links to play the music. They’ve already started down that path, now the need to finish it.

I’ve just added a new page in the How To’s section that describes how to create and burn a custom CD with Rhapsody. When RealNetworks acquired Rhapsody 4 years ago, one of the things they were able to add to the Rhapsody client was a really nice CD burning technology that is available in the premium version of RealPlayer. The CD Burner in Rhapsody creates a really good sounding, well balanced CD that burns in a .CDA format which is the widely distributed version in standard CDs. Click here to read how to burn a custom CD with Rhapsody.

DRM (Digital Rights Management) free MP3s are the same sort of buy it/use it where you want type music files you get when you buy a CD. As long as you are using it for personal purposes, not re-selling or swapping in the peer to peer networks - they are totally legal eagle. Better yet, because they are in DRM free universal MP3 format - they play on ipods, Sandisks or any MP3 playing device without the need for re-coding - FREE AT LAST! This is hot on the heels of releases by both iTunes and Walmart for selling DRM files - however there are some big differences. The table above helps separate the wheat from the chaff on what’s what.

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