I have actually spend a lot of time playing around with Rhaposdy. I have had an account for a few months now, and i'm very happy with it. The way it works is that it streams the audio to your computer, allowing you to play it... it caches the stream to a encrypted file on your hard drive, allowing you to come back and play the same song agin without having to download stream it again.

I got a promo deal through real.com or where I could get 2 weeks for free, then it was $4.95 for the first 3 months, then $9.99 for the months after that, with $0.79 downloads. I think it’s a great deal, I have a fast connection and the music never skips, and always starts playing within a 1 to 3 seconds of clicking the play button. I’m impressed with the concept. I just wish you could download the actual wma file.

Getting the tracks to your empeg is hard if you care a lot about sound quality. You see, when you burn a CD, you are not buring a bit for bit copy of the CD that you get in the store. You are burning the compressed streams used to play the tracks. the streams are in the latest media player format, and in my opinion, sounds a LOT better then mp3. There is no “woshing” sounds that you sometimes get with mp3, and it sounds much cleaner, a noticeable difference in my opinion.

The problem is that now you have a compressed file, windows media, and then you burn it to CD, you have to then re-encode that file into mp3 to play on the empeg. I can tell that there was a re-encoding process done to the file because its really like encoding and mp3 that was already encoded.

The only way to get around this, would be to somehow grab the bit stream of the data coming over the network, into your computer, and save that directly as a wmf file. That would give you best sound quality. But you can't. They wont let you download the files like that (yet). So you have to burn the CD and RE ENCODE to mp3. Its not BAD, in fact, its pretty good, but its a step below where my ears would like to be. The only improvement i can see, is downloading the files directly as wmf and putting thoes directly on your empeg.

I've also played the streams from my digital sound card into my DAT recorder, and the playback is amazing. It sounds really good... because i'm using a professional sound card, that gives me direct WAVE output SPDIF right to the DAT. There is no extra noise that you get in the sound, like you would with a sound blaster using digital out. (sound blasters are not truly bit for bit digital out, they have a mixer that will allow you to change the volume of the digital out, but that's not the true signal, you can get a lot of distortion from that, esp if you turn the gain up and get digital clipping). Just because your card says, Digital SPDIF, that just means there is a SPDIF “connector” on the back of the card, you don’t know where that signal is coming from… in MOST cases, I’ve found, unless you’re using a professional sound card, like the ones found in a recording studio, for recording to pro tools or something, you will be getting a noisy feed from a virtual mixer in your software, and not a true wave output from the audio program. Anyway, like I was saying, If i wanted to, i could play the DAT back into the computer and record to WAVE files directly from the DAT, bit for bit, with this pro digital board. (its the Gina Card 20 bit by Echo Audio) but that's a pain in the butt, you have to go through a lot of steps to get the finished wave or mp3, plus you dont always know where to cut the tracks, esp listening to a live album.

So for now, I just burn the CD and rip to mp3, and i live with that. I wish they would let you download the wmf, so i can put that file directly onto the empeg. It would sound better then re-encoding back to mp3 again.

By the way, does anyone know how to extract the wm file from the temp file that is stored on your computer? I would be willing to pay the 79 cents if I could download that file, instead of burning a CD. I don’t even play CDs anymore.

I love talking about this stuff, so dont hesitate to ask me stuff about it.