All the music you want to listen to, even if you’re not connected to a data network – is a pretty good offer. Rhapsody is offering such a plan.
I was a little skeptic at first and couldn’t find reviews for the service (specially for the offline cache feature) so decided to write one.
Here are the highlights:
- Subscription costs you $9.99 for 1 device & $14.99 for 3 device per month
- On iPhone (the device I’m using) you can cache/ download songs that you can listen to while not connected to 3G/ WiFi
- The bit-rate for downloaded songs is questionable. My guess is 128 kbps. From what I’ve learned they’re in WMA format. Quality is barely acceptable.
- You can only download songs in a playlist (??). I guess this is to prevent you from being able to just download albums without jumping through hoops. You HAVE to put the songs in a playlist first (which “thankfully” you can do from your web account) to listen to them offline.
- The Rhapsody iPhone app has a “strict offline” mode where the app does not try to connect to your Rhapsody account for authorization.
- Rhapsody does not have an official desktop player for Mac (forget Linux)
- Rhapsody’s catalog is pretty extensive but it does not include everything. Example: I searched for A-Ha. Turns out they don’t have a number albums on the catalog e.g. Minor Earth Major Sky & Lifelines. So definitely DO a search for your favorite obscure artist and look for the number of albums available before you sign up.
That’s all for now. I’ll update the review as I discover new things.
