One Step Up and Two Steps Back

Ah, RealNetworks. You know them, don't you? They're the company with the colorful CEO and the crappy software. Well, you think I would have learned my lesson by now but...

Today's big news was that RealNetworks has announced a major upgrade to their Rhapsody streaming music service. In case you don't know, Rhapsody is a subscription music service that streams music over the internet to your computer. It's kinda of like a big jukebox and for about 10 bucks a month you can stream as many songs as you want, but you can't download them. You can, however, purchase the songs and burn them to a CD.

That is to say, that was the Rhapsody service. With the new upgrade you can still listen to streams, but now Rhapsody has added the ability to download tracks to your computer and add them to portable MP3 players, and that includes the 800 pound gorilla of the music world the Apple IPod. At least that's what they claim. I don't have an IPod so I can't verify that.

To make the upgrade even sweeter, they have also taken a page from rival Napster and added the ability to add an unlimited amount of music to your portable device for a monthly subscription fee that is about 5 bucks over their regular subscription rate. Unfortunately, as of today there are only 2 devices which support this feature, although RealNetworks promises that they will eventually support hundreds more (including the IPod).

I'm sure that "sue-happy" Apple Computer will be agreeable to that.

Ok, so far, so good, and I should mention that I've been a Rhapsody subscriber for many years. I've always found it a good way to sample a wide variety of music without having to buy CD's and downloads. When I originally subscribed they were still owned by an outfit called Listen.com which was subsequently sold to RealNetworks, an acquistion I was sure would spell gloom and doom for Rhapsody but luckily Real seemed to be content to leave well enough alone and let Rhapsody go on pretty much as it always had.

Until today.

Now, before I get started on my rant I should probably say a word or two about RealNetworks. If you're on the internet at all then I'm sure you already know them. They're the company behind all those Real audio and video streams that seem so ubiquitous on all the major media sites around the world, and if all you do is click on an occaisional video clip that plays back using the RealPlayer software then you're probably totally unaware of Real's true mission in life. That is, to completely own your computer and all the media in it. Yes, I'll admit they've gotten a bit tamer in recent years, but Real has always had this nasty predisposition towards insinuating themselves into the deepest, darkest recesses of your computer and seizing control of all it's systems.

Which brings me to the Rhapsody upgrade. First off, let me say that the interface update was long overdue. The old one had been around for at least 3 or 4 years and was feeling a bit clunky, especially compared to it's slicker rivals. While the new interface isn't up to the standards of the current state-of-the-art in media players, it is a big improvement over what came before. I won't go into the details here, but essentially what they've done is merge the Rhapsody streaming service and the RealPlayer10 media player.

And that's the problem.

Everything was going peachy-keen until I decided to add my mp3 player to the devices list within Rhapsody. You need to do this before you can transfer music to your portable device and it's quite a common procedure these days. I've done it in Napster, I've done it in Audible, I've done it in Windows Media Player - all in all a pretty straightforward procedure. So I told Rhapsody to add the device and it dutifully informed me it would have to download some drivers to do that. Again, no problem, all the players need to do that. But, you see, I forgot. This is not any media player I'm dealing with - this is RealNetwork's media player, the company that is hell bent on dominating the world with crappy software.

Ok, this is the rant part.

Let's see, where do I begin. After I installed the drivers I plugged my device into the computer and immediately Real assumed it was time to take control of my system. Now Napster never did that, Audible never did that, but good 'ol Real, they just figured that since I installed their player that meant I would never, ever want to control how I access my device again. "Just have a seat over there, little fella', and let Real take over" is what they seemed to be saying.

So like I said, I plugged in my device and immediately 5 new windows popped up on my screen (that's right, I said 5 NEW WINDOWS! I counted 'em), and each window asked me the same question. Would you like Real to take over from here or would you like to take no action and cancel. So I clicked "Take No Action, Cancel", "Take No Action, Cancel", "Take No Action, Cancel", "Take No Action, Cancel", and "Take No Action, Cancel". Down at the bottom of each window there was also a little box which asked me if I would always like Windows to perform the same action when I connected my device, and I clicked that box too. Naively I assumed that that Windows would remember that setting and not ask me the same questions the next time I connected, butI forgot - this used to be my computer but it was Real's computer now.

After I closed all the windows I launched Windows Media Player and luckily my device showed up and everything looked fine so I let it go at that and didn't think any more of it. Of course, you know what's coming and sure enough the next time I started my computer and connected the device up come the 5 new windows again. This time I shut 'em down and went immediately into Rhapsody to try to find some way to stop these stupid windows from popping up, and lo and behold when I went into their little device area I found out that my device wasn't even listed. I had installed it, I was getting the 5 new windows, but it wasn't there. Seemed like the natural thing to do was click on the little install button and try installing it again.

Real didn't like that.

As soon as I clicked the button and I swear I heard a little voice coming from inside my computer. "Did I give you permission to press that little button? Did I? Hmmm?" Needless to say, I was spitting in the face of God and that was all she wrote.

You know there are crashes and there are freezes, and there are hard crashes and there are hard freezes, but this crash was like the Titanic hitting an iceberg. First the little progress bar starts going and gets to about 24% and then stops, then it tells me it needs to shut down Rhapsody and freezes, and then it stays frozen for about 5 minutes until finally I open up the task manager and shut it down manually, and then all of a sudden the progress bar starts moving again and asks me if I want to replace my more recent driver with this older driver that Rhapsody wants to install so of course I tell it "Hell no" and click continue, and then...well, that was not the response that Rhapsody wanted to hear.

The computer rebooted fine after I finally managed to shut it down and restart it, but plugging in my mp3 player was not a good idea. Immediately the computer started acting like it had just OD'd on seconal. It just began to run slower, and slowwwer, and slowwwwwweeeer, and slowwwwwwwwweeeeeeeerrrrr, and was running so slow, in fact, that it took about 3 minutes just to get the task manager to come up so I could shut the thing down and restart it. After the second restart I opened up Windows Media Player and this time, no device. Rhapsody had completely hosed my mp3 player.

Well, this has gone on longer than I wanted so to make a long story short let me just say that a visit to a website, and a reinstall eventually fixed the problem, but sheesh, what a pain just because I didn't want to install Real's lousy old drivers. It goes without saying that I won't be using Rhapsody to connect to my device, and who knows, maybe Real will manage to muck things up so bad that I'll be through with Rhapsody for good. I guess that's what they call "reverse engineering". Taking something that works and breaking it.