Leander Kahney doesn't have kind words for the Rhapsody music service, but I think his raspberry is somewhat misdirected; the real problem is in the OS:

To cut a long story short, every step has been a pain, from downloading new firmware for the player to updating the Windows' underlying DRM software. And that was just to get it working.

Once up and running, the first batch of tunes I downloaded generated nearly 10,000 errors. I couldn't believe my eyes. I wish I'd taken a screenshot.

Since then, the software has been dog slow and unpredictable. It's constantly downloading tunes that I'm unable to sync to the device.

The problem likely isn't specifically with Rhapsody - rather, it's with the excitement of DLL Hell on Windows. A few weeks ago, I wanted to do a COM Connect demo for Smalltalk Daily. I couldn't get VW or ObjectStudio to talk to iTunes via COM. At first, I thought it was a problem on the Smalltalk side (COM on VW does not have a good reputation). I got suspicious when the same problem arose in ObjectStudio. I started swearing when I had an engineer show me code that worked fine for him.

Uninstall, reinstall (of iTunes and XPlay), with many reboots in between. Everything worked fine after that. Which is where we get to the uniqueness of every Windows install

Ever pay close attention to installer messages? Periodically, they tell you (or warn you) that some DLL somewhere is being overwritten. Some of those DLL's are shared by multiple apps. That's what happened with iTunes here; I'd guess that some set of DLL's on Kahney's machine weren't quite correct, but the Rhapsody installer assumed they were. It's as I said in the title - every Windows installation is unique, and each has its own problems.

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