Archives for February 2002

AudioWorld Rating:

Got Streams if You Want ‘Em

If your reason for searching music on the Web is to check out some new sounds and artists, and listen to the music you like while you’re at your PC, Listen.com’s Rhapsody has you covered.

The subscription service has a good, wide-ranging selection of material from more than 50 labels, including three of the five “majors” (EMI, Warner Music and BMG), plus independents like Virgin, GNP Crescendo, and Naxos. If you’re looking for files you can download and transfer to CD or to a portable MP3 player, look elsewhere: Rhapsody offers online streaming only.

As a search and discovery service, Rhapsody is a winner. You access the database through the Rhapsody browser, an application you download and install on your Windows PC (Mac and Linux users need not apply). The browser is set up to provide ready access to a variety of search and browse functions. It incorporates a Windows Media player that integrates audio playback seamlessly with both the search environment and a database of music and artist info supplied by Muze.

You can search by artist name, track title, album title and composer. Results include both content available through Rhapsody (linked and highlighted in blue), and information about other tracks and material not available for streaming. When you are listening to a selection, either via on-demand or radio-style streaming, the player shows links to the performer’s main information page, and to the specific album page, so you have quick access to further exploration.

Rhapsody’s search and browse interface is elegant, logical and provides useful results quickly. It also integrates the track data with additional background information, and the music itself, in an intuitive way that takes the experience of searching for music online to a new level.

As for audio performance, what you get here is near-CD quality, the best streaming performance available within Microsoft’s Windows Media (WMA) environment. It’s perfectly adequate for casual listening, especially when it’s tied to playback on your home computer – but for serious listening I’d rather have the CD.

Now what the service needs is about ten times as much content (currently around 100,000 tracks), the right to burn CD’s or transfer files to portable players, and higher quality audio performance (maybe use Liquid Audio infrastructure instead of WMA?), and we might have a service worth subscribing to.

AudioWorld Rating:

PLUS

• good editorial content and recommendations
• useful integration with video and other media
• extensive file management, playlist and tag editing features (downloaded files)
• good audio quality (downloaded files only)

MINUS

• no CD burning or transfers to portable players allowed
• buggy, unstable software, too-frequent crashes
• poorly designed search interface
• downloads usable for 30 days only
• service available in U.S. only

AudioWorld Recommends:
Skip it – this service is more trouble than it’s worth. Besides, downloading music files without being able to burn them to CD or to load them in a portable audio player doesn’t make sense when you’re paying a monthly subscription fee.

Product Description

• CD-quality music file downloads by monthly subscription
• more than 80,000 downloadable tracks from 3 major labels plus independents
• 48 channels of streaming music organized by genres (lo-fi audio only)
• subscription packages priced from $9.95 to $24.95 (US) per month
• available in the U.S. only

AudioWorld Rating:

Selling Online Music As If You’d Really Rather Not

RealOne Music, as offered by RealNetworks, might better be named: RealDud.

The much-hyped MusicNet online music subscription service, with backing from major labels EMI, Warner Music and Bertelsmann (BMG), is available as an add-on to Real Networks’ premium paid content service, RealOne. It will soon be available through America Online as well. Given the restrictions placed on the material you download, and the relatively high cost per download, it’s hard to see why anyone but a fanatic would subscribe.

Here’s the deal.

For $9.95 per month, you get to download 100 files and stream 100 more tunes. You can use the downloads for 30 days, and then they expire (unless you pay for them again out of the next month’s allocation). The streams are low-quality one-time plays, presumably only useful as a way to check out unfamiliar music so you can decide if it’s worth downloading (there’s no other way to preview or sample the available tracks). You can only play downloaded files on your PC: no burning to CD or transfers to portable players allowed.

If the poor value proposition isn’t enough to kill RealOne Music, how about this: the RealOne Player software required to access the service is buggy and prone to crashes (my favorite frequent crash happens when I try to stream a track, but haven’t already downloaded a track during the current session – a classic Catch-22 situation).

But wait, that’s not all — the search function is poorly designed, too! After a search (by keyword, artist, track title, or album title), you are presented with track-by-track listings, but there is no way to click through to an artist or album detail page, the obvious next step. All you can do is either stream or download the individual tracks.

This is all a pity, because buried beneath the roadblocks there is some good content, including a useful ‘recommendations’ feature (“Similar Artists”), and album reviews and artist biographies drawn from the All Music Guide. Oh yes, and some good music, with fine sound quality (downloads only, the streaming audio sounds quite bad).

AudioWorld Rating:

PLUS

• rock solid streaming performance and client software
• unlimited, all-you-can-stream subscription
• good search and browse interface
• useful editorial content and recommendations

MINUS

• no downloads, transfers or CD burning
• limited selection of on-demand content
• less-than-CD audio quality
• USA only, not available in other countries
• Windows only, not available for MacOS

AudioWorld Recommends:
If you just want to find a good selection of high-quality music, sample some new artists, and listen while you are at your PC, Rhapsody is a good value.

Product Description

• streaming music on demand
• more than 100,000 tracks from 3 major labels and 40 independents
• unlimited access by monthly subscription
• subscription packages priced from $5.95 to $9.95 (US) per month
• available in the U.S. only