Rhapsody Reviewer's Comments

Our third ranked product and "TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award Winner." RealPlayer Rhapsody offers over a million titles to choose from, excellent search capabilities and quick, convenient downloads.

The music available from RealPlayer Rhapsody comes in a .rax format, which can only be played on RealPlayer devices. This, coupled with the obnoxious way RealPlayer aggressively assigns itself as your primary media player and places shortcuts everywhere on your computer, is the reason why RealPlayer didn't win our #1 or #2 spot.

MP3 Music Selection:  

With a million plus titles and 22 genres of music available, RealPlayer Rhapsody is definitely an over-achiever in the music download industry. We were impressed with this store's selection and confident that you can find most any music you're looking for.

Search Capablities:  

RealPlayer Rhapsody offers all the search capabilities we use, including Artist, Album and Song Name. If you don't know the song name or artist, or if you just want to browse, you can search by genre. This service also offers interesting information about the albums and individual artists found on the site.

Feature Set:  

RealPlayer Rhapsody comes with its own integrated music player, which allows you to download and listen to music faster. This service also offers every feature we look for in a good music download service, including the ability to copy songs to CD.

While RealPlayer does include a link to a site that shows if your portable digital music device is supported, those who find their device can't support RealPlayer, will probably find Rhapsody much less useful and may want to look for a service that will work for their desktop computer and their portable device.

Download/Setup:  

We didn't experience any problems while downloading RealPlayer Rhapsody. The process is simple, just click a few buttons and you're ready to start searching for songs. But, as mentioned earlier, unless you spend extra time doing a custom install to limit RealPlayer's power (requiring lots of box un-checking) you will end up with RealPlayer all over your computer and every other media player on your machine will automatically take a backseat to it.

The music downloads for RealPlayer Rhapsody are super simple too, and once you've downloaded the songs you want, you can often find extra plug-ins to allow you to transfer RealPlayer to your portable digital music device.

Help/Support:  

RealPlayer Rhapsody comes with above-average help, offering a searchable knowledge base of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), a Getting Started Wizard and a community message board. This service, however, did not offer a technical support phone line or instructive tutorials.

But for now, if you own an iPod—even though it can support RealPlayer Rhapsody—we suggest iTunes Music Store. If you have any other portable digital music device, our #1-rated service, Musicmatch On-Demand, is a smart call.