Welcome to the "Real" World . . .

. . . my URGE service has been swallowed up by Real Network's Rhapsody service. The terms of service have stayed the same, but now I get access to the Rhapsody catalog of downloadable and streamable tracks.

Like most computer users I've come to despise Real and their buggy, invasive and awkward software. But I'm willing to give them another chance. The big plus to this change is that Rhapsody's catalog is really, really big, and with the addition of the URGE catalog, it's now freakin' huge.

The minus is that to use all the features of this new combined service you have to use the Rhapsody media player. I don't like it so far. It's clunky, it's been buggy so far (even so far as to get blue screened twice since I've started using it, and since I've been using Vista blue screens had been a thing of the long forgotten past).

I like the quality of the streamed audio, however, and am going to experiment with NOT downloading tracks to my computer. So far it works fine and that frees up gig after gig of space. Also, Rhapsody is fully compatible with my Samsung portable, so I can still listen to my subscribed tunes in my car.

The interface still sucks, they're trying too hard to look and feel like iTunes and they do a piss-poor job of it (and I don't really like iTunes in the first place, WMP11 FTW!!!).

But my sub doesn't run out till December, so I'll give them till then to work out the kinks, and if the mysterious blue screens of death don't keep coming up, and the streams continue to work as well as they seem to do, I may stick with this service.

Haven't tried to break it yet, we'll see how good the stream sounds while using bittorrent (for legally tradeable goods only, of course).