Rhapsody, Sandisk, and Best Buy made a series of big announcements today at a joint press conference in New York hosted by none other than his royal puffness, Sean "P. Diddy" Coombs: Rhapsody 4.0, the Sandisk Sansa Rhapsody e200R (3GB, 4GB, 6GB), and a new, 4.0-powered version of Best Buy's Rhapsody clone.
Rhapsody 4.0, which I previewed here recently, overhauls the service with even more ways to access the 2.5 million or so songs currently offered. The biggest new deal is the addition of Rhapsody Channels, which are chunks of five or so hours of music. A channel called "My Rhapsody Channel" gives you about five hours of music Rhapsody thinks you will like, based on your activity. The experience feels sort of like listening to satellite radio, except you can fast forward (no rewind on Rhapsody Channels due to a licensing deal) and there are no signal dropouts.
The new version also includes Dynamic Playlists, which are 15 or so tracks in genres such as "alt country." Each Tuesday, Dynamic Playlists are updated with the week's new releases, so subscribers can stay on top of the latest music from their favorite genres. Of course, you can still transfer your own MP3s, albums, Rhapsody subscription songs, etc., but these new options expose you to much more music and might help you discover your new favorite band.
If you have iTunes, you can have Rhapsody 4.0 clone your music collection – including purchased tracks (!) – into Rhapsody subscription files. It does this by examining the file headers and resupplying the song in the new format, rather than converting the DRM-ed iTunes file.
Rhapsody 4.0 lets you drag-and-drop any group of songs (tracks, albums, Rhapsody Channels, Dynamic Playlists, user-created playlists, etc.) directly into your library or onto your connected Sandisk Sansa Rhapsody e200R.
This new line of MP3 players (2GB, 4GB, 6GB) is identical to the existing Sansa e200 except for the fact that it features new firmware with "Rhapsody DNA" (the same API responsible for Sonos's new Rhapsody integration), developed by Real itself. The main attraction this Rhapsody DNA adds is the ability to interact with your subscription songs on the player itself (although certainly, the player's compatibility with Rhapsody can only be helped by the fact that Rhapsody designed the device's firmware).
The Sansa Rhapsody e200R processes subscription song licenses in a new way. PlaysforSure devices verify each song license before they play a song, adding a couple of seconds of silence before a song can play and resulting in error messages when you try to play a song which hasn't had its license updated.
The e200R, on the other hand, ratifies licenses for all songs on the device every time you connect it to your computer (you have to do this at least once a month, which is easy to do, since this is also how the device recharges). An indicator light on the device turns from green to yellow to red as you get closer to the day when the licenses need updating (Rhapsody 4.0 indicates this date on the bottom of the screen, which is a nice, transparent touch). The e200R also uses USB mass storage mode rather than MTP, meaning that songs transfer onto the player about twice as fast as they do onto a PFS device – and faster than from iTunes onto the iPod, according to Rhapsody. This speed is key, considering how much music Rhapsody 4.0 encourages you to load onto the player.
On the Sansa Rhapsody e300R, you can tag songs from any Rhapsody Channel or Dynamic Playlist for addition to your library, add it to your 'To Go' subscription, or set a rating from 1-5. The next time you sync the player, your that info syncs back into Rhapsody and shapes the content they give you in your own personalized Rhapsody Channel, called My Rhapsody.
Here are some other new tidbits about Rhapsody 4.0 and the Sandisk Sansa Rhapsody e200R:
- I detected a little squiggly sound before some tracks on a Sansa e200 that had been flashed with the new Rhapsody firmware.
- The player appears to have a built-in semi-Sleep mode; if it's been awhile since you've pressed a button, you'll need to press it twice.
- The Sansa Rhapsody e200R comes with two months of a free Rhapsody subscription.
- You can create your own Rhapsody Channel by specifying certain artists.
- Every artist has a Rhapsody Channel dedicated to it.
- I met with Best Buy once, and they told me that the most-stolen item from their stores is the MP3 player, which I found hilarious (steal the music, steal the song). Now that Best Buy's offering such a strong (albeit DRM-ed) music service, maybe more Best Buy customers will stop stealing music as well as the hardware that plays it.
- By the end of the year, Rhapsody predicts that its subscription will offer a full three million songs.
- Rhapsody 4.0 will be able to post and update your listening history on a blog using RSS.
- Rhapsody adds between 30,000 and 50,000 new tracks every week, and should reach 3 million tracks by the end of the year. The service originally launched with only 35,000 songs.
