This week, Real announced the release of Rhapsody on the Web. I have to say it is pretty impressive. It works really well and for once, the installation procedure was flawless. Playback works well (I hear that it’s the same old RAD/EA technology underneath the hood from our old TuneTo days!). Kudos to JeremyC & JeffL for the effort.

BUT what I really like and I have been telling these guys long before I left that they needed to open up the service through a web api and they did it ! It’s not completely SOAP yet as they simply mapped URLs to Artists pages. They also have RSS feeds to custom playlists. But I hear that they will provide WSDL soon so it’s a good sign for more fun stuff to come. Keep it coming guys!

Meanwhile, I saw in the press release that a new upgrade of the Rhapsody client was available. They call it the
Rhapsody Jukebox Software now. I fired up my version and sure enough an optional upgrade was there. Well I was also impressed. The installation looks a lot nicer. Good job Matt! No more old school Windows 95 dialog boxes ;-). New splashscreen, very nice. AND Alex, the UI master, finally fixed the annoying bug I never told him about. When scrolling down the playlist, there was always some flickering going one at the bottom of the playlist area. Well now it’s fixed. Looks like he rewrote the bitmapped scrollbars once again ;-). I do like the reorg of the playlist controls next to the playback area. BUT where is the visualizer! I can’t believe this feature was cut because we didn’t have a complete full screen support. Now it’s been a year and still it’s not there. Alex, can you show us how to make it show in the UI, I know it’s in the skin still and it’s just a matter of tweaking the xml to make it show ;-)

Now there’s just one thing that is missing. The blogging has not been enhanced to support more blogging sites. When I came up with this feature for Rhapsody, I was running Moveable Type at home but now that I moved to WordPress, it ain’t working no more ;-) So I got to figure out a way if I can use a bookmarklet … Let’s try it!