Monday, March 15, 2010

Sneak Peek: Rhapsody’s Upcoming iPhone App

READ more on Wired.com

"Subscription music service Rhapsody showed us a new version of its iPhone app that includes the feature we’ve been clamoring for: the ability to store music on the iPhone so that it can play even when you’re on the subway, plane, highway or another location where it’s difficult or impossible to get a strong enough signal to support high-quality music streaming.

Company spokesman Ryan Luckin said Rhapsody expects Apple to approve the app — after all, Apple allows Spotify to cache playlists on the iPhone’s memory in countries where it’s available.

Not only will this offline playback feature make it possible to listen to thousands of Rhapsody songs without a strong wireless data connection, but it also significantly extends battery life — a crucial consideration for any portable device, seeing as how batteries appear to be the only area of technology not subject to Moore’s Law.

Rhapsody adds another twist that has yet to appear in the Spotify iPhone app: a “force offline mode” that temporarily removes all non-cached songs from the Rhapsody app’s library. The utility of this feature may not be readily apparent, but it’s actually useful, because it lets you shuffle through your library, playing only the music contained in cached playlists."

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