Waxing Rhapsodic

A funny thing happened to me as I got older - instead of narrowing my music interests to when I was a teen like many do, I've found my interests broadening. Shockingly, even a little country music has wandered into my library. The outlaw branch to be specific, what they have on the radio isn't real country to me. I was always partial to Johnny Cash's early music and from there I've found some Waylon Jennings that I like. My music library (in the form of CD's and digital) has become very eclectic, with many genres represented: bebop, swing, old-time Norwegian, pop, rock, post-grunge, classic rock, new wave, experimental, classical, orchestral soundtracks, motown, funk, Sinatra, Dino, game soundtrack, and oddball.

It is growing thanks to finding a better music service than iTunes. Currently, I'm subscribing to Rhapsody from the folks at Real. It isn't without quirks or bugs, but no show stoppers for me like Apple's product. Once I learned to work around the IE7 problems and hack the registry to force subscription tracks to WMA format, I became a happy camper. The latter is a must do for people using subscription tracks on their compatible players, it saves a second downloading from Rhapsody and cuts down on disk space used. Hopefully, it will be a menu option with the next version. The tracks are better quality than iTunes, using a better bitrate and format as AAC loses its superiority over 128 kps even over MP3.

The best part of the subscription service is being able to listen to the entire tune before downloading it. Napster does the same thing and I think Apple is really missing the boat there since some tracks don't get good until a minute in. The option to buy and burn is there too, at 89 cents a track. I've gotten a few so far due to being impecunious and will buy others over the next year or so. The streaming "stations" and playlists are interesting and I'll get around to playing with them more, but with our ISP I can't count on reliable streaming.

At some point I'll get the code up to show what's playing on my PC. In the meantime, I've got thousands of tracks to rate...