I’ve been beta testing the new Rhapsody MP3 player coming out from RealNetworks and Sandisk. The MP3 player is nice, but the thing that makes me excited is how seamlessly Rhapsody works with the device. I’ve been listening to the new Tom Petty, G. Love & Special Sauce and John Mayer albums all on my Sansa Rhapsody player using just my Rhapsody subscription and the new player.

What I like best about the Rhapsody MP3 Player:
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I recently had the pleasure of catching Brandi Carlile at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle on August 2nd. Interestingly enough, this was not her first time at the zoo this year as she made a guest appearance with the Indigo Girls singing Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen) solo and then singing the Michael Stipe part of the wonderful “Kid Fears”. Anyhow, Brandi was really wonderful as she has a very unique voice, is a local NW performer and had a tight band.

She sang a full selection of tunes from her first (and only) album including Hallelujah again as a solo for the second encore. Although her guitar playing is nothing spectacular, it fit’s her tone and tempo just right. She was very personable and thanked the crowd for making this her largest show ever.
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As I laid on my Chiropractor’s table listening to some nice music and getting my back cracked, I asked my chiro what he did for music in the office. He said they have switched from Muzak and the $50 a month they charge to playing CDs they bring in. “I couldn’t listen to the latin channel one more time” he confessed. This got me thinking about all of the small office environments out there and if Rhapsody might be a good fit for them. I think so, let’s review:
1) Rhapsody has tons of music that you can either program through a playlist or pick a genre and let it play. Overr 2,000,000 songs with all genres - you’ll find something that works - blues, jazz, classical, adult alternative, etc.
2) You can play specific albums are artists if you want and if in the mood
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I’ve just started using the Sansa e250 mp3 player with Rhapsody to Go and boy do I like it. I’ve been an ipod mini user for close to two years, but the battery is going on the iPod and I got the Sansa e250 cheap. It’s a 4gb player, but what is nice is that with my Rhapsody to Go subscription, I can put any song in Rhapsody onto my player with having to download it or rip it from a CD to my hard drive! I put some old Faces, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Black Eyed Peas, Them, Radiohead and Tragically Hip songs on. Some of which I own the CD and some I don’t. This is really nice as I’m able to break out of the list of songs in iTunes that I’ve imported from my rather extensive CD collection. I have over 725 CDs, most of which have been ripped into iTunes, but am always looking for new music to listen to. Totally worth the $14.99 per month….

It’s funny, I get this question a lot when talking about Rhapsody. I just assume everyone knows what Rhapsody is, but it’s time for a clear definition.

Rhapsody is a music subscription service that delivers the following:
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I came across another blog focused on rhapsody and music so I thought I’d share it.
http://rockschool.blogspot.com/

Fired up Rhapsody this morning and one of the featured albums was the soundtrack to Blow-Up (1966) featuring Herbie Hancock and the Yardbirds. I’ve heard the “greatest hits” of yardbird and knew it was a pivotal band in the British Invasion. I also knew it as the cross over point of the Holy Trinitity: Clapton, Page and Beck. The Blow-up soundtrack has one of only three songs recorded with both Beck and Page together (Stroll On). I listened to Stroll On (sounds like Train Kept a Runnin’) loved it and dove into the Yardbirds section of Rhapsody. Found “Roger the Engineer ” with Clapton and loved it! That’s the power of Rhapsody.

Another good music resource is Wilson and Alroy’s Record Reviews (www.warr.org) who has a great write-up on the Yardbirds.

The latest version of iTunes inlcudes a new feature called “MiniStore” which suggests albums and artists based on songs in your library. This means that iTunes has crawled your harddrive for files that match music types without your tacit approval (it is probably buried in the user license which I never read - who does?). In some circles, this is considered spyware. Do you really care?

We have all seen personalization from Amazon, Rhapsody Music Service and others based on information we have actively given them (bought a book, listened to Muddy Waters or Jett) and those services generate recommendations based on that. There are other services like Claria, Gator, 180Solutions that watch our behavior online, keep it in a database and display ads to us based on that - this is termed spyware.
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Rhapsody gives you:

• Unlimited access to over a million songs
• Personalized music recommendations
• Unlimited custom radio
• Personal playlist sharing in Playlist Central
• CD burning and music transfer to 100+ devices
• US$9.99/month - FREE FOR FIRST 14 DAYS

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