amassed lust Blog of Raymond Angel; Startup Enthusiast, CEO

I promised that I’d give my full scoop on Real Rhapsody soon and today I plan on keeping that promise.

A while back I downloaded and installed Real Rhapsody on a fourteen day trial. I’ve had and used Real Rhapsosdy in the past but heard they had made several improvements. They also sent an email asking me to give it a second chance.

So I decided to be fair and give it another install and ignore my previous poor experience with the software and the service.

The install went fairly quickly but attempted to install Spyware on my system, thankfuly I caught it hidden away in the installer and was able to prevent it from infecting my system. Strike 1. Big strike 1.

After a fairly quick install I signed in using my account name and password found some tracks to play and started arranging them in to a play list.

Easy enough thus far.

I found the music catalog to be extensive enough but the player was already using a large chunk of memory and space on my screen.

One feature I found handy was the ability to make the player a small bar that when hovering your mouse over the right hand or left hand side it would display what is playing.

I however have the Logitech G-15 keyboard which normally displays what music I am playing on my keyboard LCD but out of the hundreds of applications I’ve used Real Rhapsody is the first one to NOT display this information on my keyboard.

The more I used Rhapsody the slower my PC  got. Strike 2.

The already large footprint of the Real Rhapsody software simply continues to grow the longer it is open. Even after closing the application the process keeps running for over thirty minutes eating resources.

Any software that I pay per month for that installs spyware on my machine is an instant DOES NOT APPROVE from me.

So Real Rhapsody… you are nothing but a REAL piece of crap.

My ongoing review of Rhapsody countinues.

Impressions thus far?

It is pretty solid software but a bit more clunky then I like.

The best feature I’ve found so far though is the ability to make the play come up when hovering over the left hand or right hand corner of my screen.

Rhapsody calls this feature the “mini-player” I often find it handy to not bring up the full player to find what song I’m hearing by simply hovering over the left hand corner.

My complaints with it though are simple. When the player is minimized make it go away off my taskbar. I can always pull it back up with the mini-player.

Is this one feature really that handy? The jury here is still out on that one as I have the Logitech G-15 Gaming Keyboard and most audio/video players show what I am listening to already on the little LCD screen on my keyboard and of course Rhapsody isn’t one of those players.

The “mini-player” is handy but I really shouldn’t have to use it. The keyboard supports nearly every other player but of course Rhapsody doesn’t report information the standard way so the “mini-player” becomes a necessity to power users such as myself who demand more.

It is still early and I’ll keep putting the service through the paces but as of right now I won’t be subscribing. The player is clunky, a memory hog, the response time slow, the lack of third party plugin support and the great deal of annoying “features” makes this a no go for me.

Today I signed up for the trial for Real Rhapsody.

Once upon a time I was a subscriber to Rhapsody and really enjoyed the level of music it brought to me. Once I purchased the Zune I cancelled my Rhapsody account and enjoyed the Zune Marketplace.

This weekend I formatted my computer and got an email inviting me back to the new and improved Rhapsody software.

So for the next fourteen days I’m giving it a trial again. Will I likely keep it after the fourteen days?

I’m honestly not sure. The software is a lot more responsive and easier to use then previously. The sound quality is pretty good but I do enjoy my Zune Marketplace because it intergrates with the Zune.

I’ll keep you posted.