So, I’ve been using both the Rhapsody.com web music service and the Rhapsody 3.1 music player back and forth and there are some big differences in both features and quality of streams. Rhapsody.com is still a relatively new service so I think it will get better, but I prefer to download the full Rhapsody 3.1 client and use that. I have a Rhapsody Unlimited account (which you can get here for free for 14 days and 5 free song downloads) which you can use for both so there is no difference in monthly costs, but here’s the break-down on the other issues.
Rhapsody.com – uses an active X plug-in for explorer 6+, firefox 1.01+, safari 1.3+(mac) and Netscape 8+. This is nice because MACs and Linux users can get Rhapsody (there is not a player version that supports MAC and Linux yet). The plug-in lets you surf the Rhapsody.com website, find the music you want and play it in a separate music player window. The music player window stays live while your doing stuff on the net in other browsers, etc which is nice. The upside is that you can go from 0 to music faster than using the Rhapsody 3.1 client because it is a couple of clicks away. Since the plug-in is much smaller than the player client everything uploads more quickly. The downside is that the streams tend to be spottier meaning that I experience more stop/pause/load issues while playing. The other downside is that there are features like CD Burning, ripping CDs, creating personalized radio stations, creating playlists and managing music in a central library that aren’t available from the website yet.
Rhapsody 3.1 Player is a downloadable client that runs a separate application from the web browser. It only works for PCs, but since it is an application – it has a lot more functionality, a greater ability to stream and buffer music streams, play videos, manage CD burning devices, access your harddrive for non-Rhapsody music and give you the ability to create your own radio stations (one of my favorite features of Rhapsody). It seems that it is always worth the extra time to get the Rhapsody player fired up and running and am more satisfied throughout the day.
Any other thoughts on this?
