“groovy mother...”

I’ve finally had a chance to test this with files downloaded from Napster and Rhapsody’s subscription services, and it does what it says on the tin. The question of interest: If this could be chained to a transcoder that automagically converted downloads to MP3s that can be played on an iPod, would it cause more customers to sign up for PlaysForSure providers, and damage sales at the iTunes Music Store?

SlimDevices have battled the uPnP demons, and Squeezeboxes will soon be able to stream Rhapsody content.

Head of Real/Rhapsody opens mouth, shite dribbles out.

Example Rhapsody album link. Follow this, and you can hear one of my favourite albums of the year so far.

Rhapsody try to keep themselves relevant — You can now listen to 25 full tracks without even signing up. So I could link to an album, and you could legally listen to the whole thing in your browser for free. Will this lead to thousands of folk linking to Rhapsody?

As a Rhapsody subscriber, I’m able to listen to only nine out of fourteen tracks from the Beck album ‘Midnite Vultures’ without forking out another $10. What idiot in charge of licensing decided that ‘Mixed Bizness” was fine for free download, but that the excellent “Debra” is blocked? Record companies: You’re morons, and this is why no-one uses your crappy “legal” alternatives to file-sharing.

Real take their Windows-only all-you-can-eat music streaming app, dump the drmcrypto into a cross-platform Firefox plugin, and expose the catalog as a webapp.