I have some old friends back in my life thanks to Wendy’s. Here’s the story.
I’m always buying ice tea from the Wendy’s around the corner from where I work. The cups are so ugly that I used to just toss ‘em but finally one day I read the stuff on their cups. They claimed that I could get free music downloads from Rhapsody. I’m always suspicious about things that claim to be free but I decided to investigate.
I collect obscure Christian Rock music—most of which seems to have never made it from vinyl to compact disk—so hoping for the best I went ahead and installed Rhapsody. (The frustrating thing about all these music sites except Amazon is that they won’t tell you what titles they carry unless you install their software first. There are certain titles that I look for or it won’t last ten minutes on my hard drive.) Anyway, I got Rhapsody installed on one of my computers.
My first reaction was disappointment. The interface is clunky. iTunes does a much better job of letting you do music searches. However, I was able to locate some titles that I was interested in downloading.
The other thing I don’t like about many music sites is their stupid encrypting of music. Rhapsody and iTunes both do this and it’s stupid. I only use Windows Media Player to listen to music so I have to waste a CD to get the music into Media Player. I have to take my songs and make a compact disk and then rip the songs using Media Player so I can listen to them. This creates music without the stupid copy protection. However, sometimes I must then manually enter all album and artist information and then find a copy of the album art and insert that also. What a waste of time. Thankfully Amazon is offering music that works as it should without all these other obstacles to enjoying a song. Anyway, I was talking about my free songs from Rhapsody.
Recently Servant has jumped from vinyl to digital and is now on many sites. I was able to get Rockin’ Revival and most of Shallow Water for free. The last track of Shallow Water is not available for individual download on Rhapsody so I had to buy it from iTunes. As I found out, Rhapsody and Real Player will not work on any 64-bit operating systems. Hey guys I’ve been running 64-bit operating systems now for over two years, lets get into the 21st Century. I also was able to get an old Benny Hester disk and a Wiggles Christmas album. Lastly I got the Stryper live album. That’s a lot of ice tea!
Oh the free downloads end on February 28th. Since Real Networks products don’t support any 64-bit OS, Rhapsody will come off my computer shortly after that date.
Thanks to Wendy’s for the free music.