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I Love Rhapsody

April 9, 2007 at 9:15 PM · Filed under Cool, Internet

I love Rhapsody. I don’t know why I didn’t sign up for this the second it was available. If you don’t know anything about online music services, let me give you the nutshell version of why I now can not live without Rhapsody. BTW, Rhapsody is Real Networks entry into the online music biz, following iTunes, and Napster. Full history if you’re interested.

For $10/month, I can listen to almost all of the music they’ve got, and it’s pretty extensive (over 3 million tracks) due to their contracts with all of the major record labels. I can organize these tracks however I want (playlists, etc.), and seconds after selecting a track, it starts playing and the quality is surprisingly good. Their built-in “Music Guide” lets me read up on the artists, find similar artists, play albums in their entirety, or select tracks or add them to my library. They’ve got an interesting feature that plays a ‘radio station’ of an artist’s genre of music. It’s not perfect, but it helps you to find stuff that’s similar in nature.

Of course, I could buy these tracks as well, but I haven’t dug deeply enough into their DRM rules to figure out if I would be hosed if I lost or moved my data. For an additional $5/mo, I can get the “to go” plan which lets me put the music onto my portable MP3 player. I haven’t decided to try that out yet. Word of warning on that though - it doesn’t work with iPods due to DRM issues.

All in all, if you like music only just a little bit and have a high speed Internet connection, get Rhapsody!

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Our Latest Website: MvixCommunity

April 1, 2007 at 4:33 PM · Filed under Internet, KJH News, Tech

Warning: Shameless plug!

Doug and I have just launched our latest venture, MvixCommunity.com. At CES, we hooked up with a small but promising company called MvixUSA that sells a number of very cool products. The most notable line of products they sell are Media Players, which as a product class have been growing over the past few years. In fact, Apple just released their own such product, the Apple TV.

So what’s a Media Player? [There are other names, like Streaming Media device and Media Center. At any rate, Media Player is what Mvix chose to go with.] Let’s phrase the answer in a problem-and-solution format. Problem: you have media (music, video, photos) all over the place (computer, DVR, etc.), and want to get it all in one place so that you can watch it on your TV. Solution: an Mvix media player! With a hard drive at its heart, an Mvix media player stores all of this media and plays it back using a on-screen control menu.

Anyway, we agreed to start a forum site that caters exclusively to Mvix products. So if you’re at all interested in these types of products, or better yet, if you own one, please jump on, sign up and participate. Tell all of your friends too!