Attn. All Music Lovers: It gets no better than this!

Ok, you've heard the song that sings "these are a few of my favorite things..." right? Well, I'm here to turn you on to my most favoritist toys that I've ever had! It is....hold your breath.....my MP3 Player coupled with the bestest, fantabulous, greatest-in-the-world music service Rhapsody-To-Go! This is actually something I've wanted to blog about for a number of months ;)

Forget about iPods and iTunes ladies and gentlemans. iPodeth stinketh in the shadows of Rhapsody Music Service (I do actually have an iPod which I have given to my 6 and 8 yr old children)!

In the essense of saving time, I'll only talk about Rhapsody-To-Go, which is Rhapsody's premium music subscription service.

Music Sub-What?
What is all this Music Service bibble-babble you ask? Very simply put, you pay money to be able to listen to music which you obtain through an internet connection. Of course, until the high data speed phones & wireless networks become more available (which has begun to happen), you need a computer & a high-speed internet (cable or DSL) to take advantage of these music services. For a fee, you can listen to the music via streaming, or download it to your computer or MP3 player.

Why Rhapsody and Not iTunes?
Very simple. iTunes is really a music purchasing service, and Rhapsody is a full subscription service with purchase options. Here's the scenario. With Rhapsody, I pay $14.99 per month and can stream as much music as I want. I can also download unlimitted music onto my hard drive and load up my MP3 player. The catch: I have to have an active subscription to continue to stream and also to listen to the downloads as they are encoded. In a nutshell: $15 a month to listen to anything I want, as much as I want, anywhere I want. Millions of songs at my fingertips! Also, I can ~buy~ songs at 89 cents each. This allows me to burn them to cd, etc in which case I ~own~ the song for good. Quite frankly, with my MP3 player, I don't need to buy the songs or burn them to cd.

With iTunes, you can purchase the songs (for 99 cents) and purchase only. If you want to listen to 789 new albums or songs this week.....that's right folks.....you pay 99 cents per song, period ;)
They're yours forever, but you must pay for each one.

iPods vs. Mp3 players-What's the big diff?
Easy question. iPods actually are MP3 players, however they are made to work with Apple's iTunes music service exclusively. iPods uses iTunes and iTunes uses iPods. They work very well together because they were made to. Other MP3 players generally work with all the other services outside of this exclusive Apple relationship, which is nice and flexible. With either kind, you can always import your own cd's or existing MP3's that you might have.

Why are iPods & iTunes so popular?
Another easy one. Basically two reasons. Marketing for sure. Apple has spent a ton and made a ton from their excellent iPod marketing. I don't much like iPods or iTunes, but even I will admit that the dancing shadows with white iPods, cords, and earbuds is super-cool marketing. Secondly, they pretty much started the whole scene being the first 'big guys' out there doing this.

Streams vs. Downloads - What's the diff?
Well, streams do just that; they stream. You listen to the music as it's coming into your computer via the internet. This is like listening to the radio. The music isn't really "in" the radio, it's just coming through the radio. When you stream music however, your computer does whats called Buffering. It loads just a small bit of the music data just ahead of itself just in case your internet connection slows or stutters. This way your music won't stutter because there a few seconds of Buffering.

When you Download music, the entire music file is downloaded onto your local computer's hard drive and can be played, even without a live internet connection. Now...the tricky part....Encoding. Just because you've Downloaded it, doesn't necessarily mean you can listen to it. Hah! Remember, with my Rhapsody subscription, I can download music to my wonderful MP3 Players & computer hard drive, but only listen to it with an active subscription. How can this be? Well, the music data is encrypted, or Encoded, and only the Rhapsody player with activated subscription knows the "secret decoding" to be able to actually play the music. Again, for additional cost, I can buy the music, which actually will download a non-encoded version of the music for uninhibited use and transfer.

Moral of the Story
If you are a complete music lover, and love the thought of listening to anything you want, whenever you want, I offer Rhapsody-To-Go as your best friend. The selection of music is truly unbelievable. A huge selection from every genre of music imaginable. The software interface is very easy to use, and very well organized to help you find something specific or try new stuff along the lines of your music taste and liking.

The Real World
In the morning on my way to work, I plug in my fully-loaded MP3 player into my FM transmitter, and vwalla..... the hundreds of tunes are coming through the FM radio in my van! When I get to work, on goes the computer, and I'm listening to Rhapsody tunes while at my desk. On the way home, back in the car again with the music. At home, we use either the home computer or the MP3 player into our main stereo speakers and we are listening to anything we want there as well; a complete smorgasbord!

If you don't own or care about the MP3 player piece, for $9.99 per month, you can get the whole package without MP3 player transfer capability.

Feel fee to browse around for your favorite artists and albums at: http://www.rhapsody.com

If you care to know more, just ask me. In case you haven't noticed, I kinda like talking about this stuff. ;) I'd be happy to talk about the multiple MP3 player capabilities, features, FM transmitters, or the new Sonos wireless home system!