RealNetworks opens its DRM-free music store with a bang

Heads up to all the music lovers out there: RealNetworks’ Rhapsody online music service opened up a new, DRM-free MP3 store, and it's giving away a free download of any $10 album to the first 100,000 people that sign up.

It’s important to note that at the time of this writing, it appears that the site is buckling under what I would hope to be a surge in traffic – most of my activities on the site  generally result in a lengthy timeout followed by a black-text-on-white-background “Proxy Error”.

Earlier this afternoon – when Rhapsody was responding to requests in a timely manner – I used the free album opportunity to consult my Amazon wishlist and pick up Venetian Snares’ “My Downfall (Original Soundtrack)”. The experience was unexpectedly pleasant.

Why unexpected? RealNetworks has something of a reputation; its infamous RealPlayer is one of the most annoying applications ever to grace the world’s PCs. The company's streaming codec is long dead; RealVideo may have seen use in the days of dial-up but nowadays anything encoded with it nowadays tends to look and sound bad. With Rhapsody’s MP3 store, my expectations were low: would I have to jump through hoops with a custom client to download my music? Would my downloads be unacceptably slow? Would I have to put up with nag offers or other assorted crud just to get to my files?

The answer, on all fronts, is a satisfied “no”. While you certainly can download Rhapsody’s music client, if you don’t want to then you are free to receive your music in a ZIP file and then dump its contents wherever – drag the files from Explorer into your music player of choice (mine’s Winamp) and go. Easy as pie! The MP3 files I downloaded were appropriately tagged – though they classify Venetian Snares as “Electronica/Dance” where a more specific tag such as “IDM,” “glitchcore” or “drill’n’bass” might be appropriate – and included a small, if serviceable, 170x170 JPEG of the album’s cover art. Downloads are also tagged with text detailing a purchase date and transaction ID, which is stored in each MP3’s comment field.

Unfortunately I can’t really compare my experience with Rhapsody to other, more popular music stores. When I’m not buying CDs or vinyl records, I usually purchase music online at specialty shops like Beatport or Digital-Tunes.net. I have a personal boycott of iTunes – don’t even have it installed, even though I use an iPod – and I usually buy used CDs from Amazon partners or local record stores as opposed to MP3 downloads. Rhapsody MP3’s experience was comparable to the other stores I do have experience with, and offering me a ZIP file was a nice touch. The quality of my music was what one might expect for a 256 kilobit MP3, which is to say excellent for all but the most trained of ears.

If I had any complaints – aside from its website being down as I write this – I would have preferred MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits, which is the maximum quality setting for standard MP3 compression. Even better: an option to download files in a lossless format such as FLAC, which would give discerning customers such as myself files that are equivalent to a CD. After loading my downloads into a sound editor and creating a spectrogram (visual analysis of a sound file) I noticed what appears to be a hard low-pass filter that cuts off all sound above the 19-to-19.5khz range – just under the upper limit for human hearing – but that is a minor complaint most likely having something to do with the MP3 process itself, and irrelevant to all but the snobbiest of music purists.

Overall, I would consider Rhapsody’s MP3 store a worthy contender in the growing arena of DRM-free music stores. I certainly can’t recommend against buying music at Rhapsody, especially since you get a no-strings-attached free album for your troubles.

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