Giving Rhapsody a try

Each Christmas season, Nadine and I pick a new Christmas CD or two to add to our collection, like we did last year. This year, with the new baby and all, we never managed to find time to go out and make the search (which is a ritual that involves dinner, lattes, and visiting multiple music stores).

Not to be deterred, I decided to give one of the on-line music services a try. I decided on Rhapsody. If you're not familiar with Rhapsody, it is a service that lets you, for a monthly subscription fee, access a large database of songs. You can play songs through a web browser our its own media player. The service boasts that it provides access to tens of thousands of songs. Until I dug in and searched around, I didn't realize how significant such a large database really is. I found artists from Aerosmith to Michael W. Smith, genres from early Jazz to the latest Pop tunes, and a large selection of Christian and worship music as well. Not all songs are available with the subscription -- some require an additional payment (usually 89 cents) to play them. But for the music that I was looking for, most of it was available with the service at no additional charge.

I had no problem adding a number of Christmas albums to my play list. The Christmas season is now over, but I've decided to keep the service for, at least, a little while longer. Its been fun finding and playing tunes from sources and archives I didn't even know existed or had long forgotten about.

Incidently, the user interface for Rhapsody is much better than the user interface for Real Player (both are provided by Real Networks), but it does beg for a back button.

(BE090)

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