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Kimbro Staken exploring creative use of technology and whatever else happens to seem interesting.
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YottaMusic - A Rhapsody web interface done right
I’ve been a big fan of the Rhapsody music service for quite a while. I’m a Mac user, but I used to keep a PC around just so that I could run the Windows client. A while back they launched a web interface for the service that allowed you to access the Rhapsody library from Mac OS X and Linux. At the time that was exciting to see … until I used it and realized how abysmal the user interface is. You can’t even queue an album through the interface, it always starts playing immediately, replacing what was already playing. I have never understood why they used that behavior. The benefit of the service is to be able to browse around and queue up various albums for playing from a mass library. With the web interface that ability just doesn’t exist which is really odd. That plus the fact their music player leaks memory forced me to switch back to running Rhapsody on Windows, only now I use a Virtual machine on my Intel based Mac. That’s a pain of course due to the memory consumption of the VM.
Anyway, boring history aside, there’s a new service called YottaMusic which puts a completely new web interface on top of the Rhapsody service. If you’re already a subscriber to Rhapsody you already have an account that will work with YottaMusic. To say that this interface blows the Real designed interface away would … well it would be the understatement of the year. YottaMusic is a modern AJAX based interface that’s simpler, more powerful and most importantly has the ability to queue an album for playing without replacing what’s already playing. It’s currently an alpha release, but looks very promising. Now, of course comes the question about how they’re going to make money? The service is free for now and there’s no advertising (unlike the Real designed web interface that pushes really annoying ads even if you’re a paid subscriber). The existence of YottaMusic just proves that Rhapsody is a great service at a fundamental level, while Real’s complete inability to put the user first is blatantly on display in the current Rhapsody web interface.
This entry was posted by Kimbro Staken on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 10:37 am and is filed under Music, Mac OS X. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.
December 1st, 2006 at 9:47 am
[…] Yottamusic.com - Kimbro turned opened my eyes to this. It’s a superior browser-based player for the Rhapsody music service. There is no Mac Rhapsody client and Rhapsody’s web player blows. I was running the Windows Rhapsody client under Parallels to get the music queueing feature that is missing from the web version but the client it hogs memory like no other program. It was monopolizing the CPU using 2GB of virtual memory. The Yotta player is all around a better experience not to mention the most responsive AJAX app I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how their search feature returns artist results so quickly. Anyways, we can’t figure out if this is some skunkworks project internal to Real to sidestep their typical advertiser-centric interface nonsense or if it is an independent entity, how they’ve been able to get such tight integration with the Rhapsody service to deliver Yotta- whoever it is, they’ve made something that’s way better. […]