Audio Xtract Pro and Rhapsody: Streaming Music for Keeps Streaming Music Affordably and Legally Scott Koegler
In the post-Napster (the free one at least) world, the costs of accumulating a substantial music collection on your hard drive have increased dramatically. But affordable – and legal – alternatives do exist for those who know where to look. Rhapsody and Audio Xtract offer contrasting ways to build your collection, with Audio Xtract taking a lesson from the days of tape recording and bypassing the legal issues that can cause so much pain and expense.
Rhapsody Music Service
Real Networks' Rhapsody is a combination Internet radio and music download site. For a monthly fee of $9.95 you can listen to any or all of the site's advertised 20,000 albums. You can use Rhapsody's player application to build your own playlists and stream music to your PC or burn CDs for as low as $.79 per song. You also get a subscription to Rhapsody's Radio PLUS, which is a collection of 50 radio stations, and you can even build your own radio stations.
We evaluated the service using the free 7-day trial account and found it easy to use but full of promotions for various artists. We don't necessarily count that as a disadvantage, though, since most of the ads have useful information and great pictures of the artists, and the user can always choose to listen to them or not.
We liked Rhapsody's service — it offers a great selection of music and the sound quality is superb. The increasingly competitive per-track pricing for burning of $.79 makes owning CD-quality copies of your favorites affordable. But you're still paying to listen to your music, and it's still going to cost you about $100 to fill up your 256MB portable MP3 player.
Audio Xtract Pro is a bundle of applications and services, and at $50 it's one of the truly great deals available for collecting music. A stripped-down version without the extras that make the Pro version convenient and ultimately useful can be had for $30. But we're betting you'll eventually upgrade to Pro, so you may as well start out there.
The center of Audio Xtract Pro is a combination Internet radio player and recorder. Think of it as your old FM radio attached to a tape recorder (but with far, far better sound quality, of course). You tune in to your favorite radio station and turn on the recorder. Everything that comes through your speakers also goes to tape. There are some very significant differences between Audio Xtract and your tape recorder, though.
First, Audio Xtract's technologies are like tape in that they both record analog sound. You may be inclined to stop reading right here, but don't. The music may be analog but it's delivered digitally, and for most of us who listen to our music through $20 earbuds, it's a challenge to tell that you're not listening to a digital recording. The other similarity with tape is that whatever you record is free ... and totally legal.
