Rhapsody can't count, doesn't realize that Firefox 3 *IS* "Firefox 1.5 or higher"

I used to be able use Rhapsody on my Mac in earlier v3.0x versions of Firefox, but now it whinges at me:



Still works fine on Safari. But I want my unlimited music in Firefox darn it! It's Saturday morning, the house is quiet, the bills are paid, and I've got a fresh pot of coffee. Let's get this done.

Hmm, let's see if I can repro this problem on another instance of Firefox.
Fire up VMware, boot my old XP VM - it still has Firefox 2 installed, so is a very good test case.
Rhapsody on FF2 works.
(FF2 nags me, as it should, to update to FF3 as FF2 is no longer being patched.) I update to FF3, and...
Rhapsody works.

Ok, so it's not a general problem. What's different about FF3 on my MacBook Pro?

Let me check the user-agent strings from both the XP and Mac instances of FF3. That's usually where apps check to see what browser version you're running check before coplaining about the browser version you're using.

Handily, there's a website www.useragentstring.com for just this purpose.

Oh, Ubiquity threw an extra item into my user-agent string, that seems to have wigged out Rhapsody.

No problem, easy enough to fix that with the incredibly useful User-Agent-Switcher Firefox extension.

And voila Rhapsody works again on Firefox on my Mac.

(PS: did you notice I snuck a lesson on troubleshooting user-agent string problems into this blog post? Can't help it. I'm a bit of a pedant you see....)

Even more Best of 2007 Rhapsody playlists

My friend Ryan is a major music buff, and every year he's put together his favorites as an Advent calendar, with a new song & review each day. 2007 version, 2005 version.

He also Rhapsodized our awesome local radio station's ( KEXP) best of list.

Paste Readers: more best albums of 2007

Inevitably, readers of Paste magazine wrote in to say "I can't believe you left ______ off your list of top albums of 2007!

Here's what they suggested:

Rilo Kiley - Under The Blacklight

Richard Thompson - Sweet Warrior

The Go! Team - Proof Of Youth

Beirut - Flying Club Cup

Romantica - America

Shout Out Louds - Our Ill Wills

Rickie Lee Jones - The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard

John Doe - A Year In The Wilderness

I'm listening now, and I like what I hear!

Rhapsody Playlist: Paste Readers: more best albums of 2007

Joe Henry is back!

Joe Henry has a new album out, Civilians. I've been liking it a lot. "Our Song" is a great track from it, starts out spotting Willy Mays in a Home Depot. Genuinely moving.

For some of Joe's older stuff, I love the albums Fuse and Short Man's Room. (You may have heard these in heavy rotation on my cd changer at Mac or on Madison.) "Monkey" and "Angels" are the first two songs from Fuse. He took his music sound in a totally different direction on this disc from where it'd been on his earlier records.

Short Man's Room is much more alt-country sounding; "Good Fortune" and "King's Highway" sound like The Jayhawks circa Hollywood Town Hall or Blue Earth. And they lyrics of the title track - well, the guy knows how to write.

More Joe factoids: he's been busy producing like a madman, and he's quite an excellent producer - see his Wikipedia entry for a partial discography (including Aimee Mann, Allan Touissant and Elvis Costello, and Loudon Wainwright III).

And his sister-in-law's surname is Ciccone. Yeah, she's even recorded one of his songs.

Click to listen on Rhapsody....

1. Our Song - Joe Henry
2. Monkey - Joe Henry
3. Angels - Joe Henry
4. Good Fortune - Joe Henry
5. Short Man's Room - Joe Henry
6. King's Highway - Joe Henry
7. Don't Tell Me - Madonna
8. Two Angels - The Jayhawks

How to not hate Rhapsody

I've been using the web version of Rhapsody all week. Aside from not syncing with a portable player, it actually works MUCH better than the Rhapsody fat client (which doesn't work on Mac OS X anyway). It does everything else I need Rhapsody to do for me - except act as a source for my Roku SoundBridge, drat!

And I haven't had ANY of the "ARrrg!! WTF?>> 'I hate Rhapsody, but it's worth $10 a month'" experience that I'd been having SO much with the fat client on Windows.

So, I suggest if you haven't recently, give the web version of Rhapsody a try.

This is on Firefox 2.0.4 on Mac OS X 10.4.9, btw.

(I should note that the main reason I use Rhapsody for subscription-based music is that a few of my friends who I share music recommendations with are addicted - if it wasn't for that I'd try a bunch of the others.)