Rhapsody upgrade is a major downgrade. Don't do it.

I've been using the Rhapsody online music service since it became available. In August 2003 I wrote a review suggesting Rhapsody may have dethroned Yahoo and MusicMatch as the best online music service. By that December, it was no longer a question. Rhapsody was the undisputed leader. For the first time in the three years since then, I'm considering canceling my subscription.

The folks at Rhapsody have fallen to the same temptation that hurts and often kills off many technology companies. I'm referring to the tendency to focus on bloating a product with more and more features rather than make it function better with the existing feature set. In this case, Rhapsody didn't even break their product by adding features. They seem to have done it while doing nothing more than trying to make it prettier. What a shame.

The new version, Rhapsody 4.0, is loaded with bugs. Every time I start Rhapsody it gives me an error that it can't connect to the network. I close it and open it again and it connects just fine. Once running, the interface is buggy to the point of being almost unusable. It looks like they've tried to integrate Flash content into the interface and that doesn't display. The screen is just blank where that content should be. The forward and back buttons on the navigation bar often disappear altogether, making it impossible to navigate the screens.

I was hopeful when an update was released a couple days ago, but it didn't fix any of this. I've restarted my Yahoo Music subscription since these problems started and, if Rhapsody doesn't get it together soon, I'm going to switch to Yahoo Music permanently.

Comments

[DCtech]

Totally agree, what a disaster... Is there any way to download old version?

[Steve]

You can download the previous version here:
http://service.real.com/rhapsody/download/version3/

[Suki Kormendi]

This is Suki Kormendi. How do I download RHAPSODY.com?

I would like to upgrade RHAPSODY.com please.

Have a nice day. Suki Kormendi

[Steve]

Hi Suki: Rhapsody seems to be largely ignoring the software application and focusing more on the browser-based version of the service (www.rhapsody.com). I've found it works best if you're using Internet Explorer. I almost never use the installed application anymore because it's such a resource hog and seems so full of bugs.

If you do want to download the software, you can get it here:
http://www.rhapsody.com/-software