Remember Rhapsody, the jukebox app and music subscription service that once pitted itself as a chief rival to Apple’s iTunes, only to fail miserably? It’s been lingering out there ever since, watching its user base erode to not only iTunes, but to streaming music services Pandora and Rdio, which both received nice little updates yesterday. But don’t write Rhapsody off yet. Today, they’ve revamped their iOS app which they likened to “the Ferrari of iPhone apps”…
A blog post sings praise for the software:
Rhapsody’s new iPhone app was just launched, and it’s a stunner. Beautiful and fully redesigned, the latest incarnation of the Rhapsody experience gets the music playing faster than ever. And did we mention that it looks amazing?
It’s got a full-screen player, the new Album page, a better way to manage My Music, the front and center artist images and album art and more. Tapping the plus sign on the revamped Now Playing screen (see images top of post) lets you quickly add the playing track to My Music, Download or add to your Queue or a Favorite playlist.
The redesigned home screen features New Releases, Popular Artists, Featured and Popular Albums. It’s also more visual, with big album and artist cover art. You can also brows music by genre and sub-genre and tap to play to commence playback.
The My Music section is now divided into two sub-sections: your cloud-based curated Library (sub-categorized by Playlists, Artists, Albums, Stations, Queue and Listening History) and on-device music Downloads for offline playback.
And here’s Rhapsody on iPad.
Rhapsody – Rhapsody International Inc. is a free download from the App Store. It’s also available for Android on Google’s Play store, though not yet with these new features.
For those who care, Rhapsody is teasing “more great things to come” from  its iOS team in the coming weeks.
Are you going to give Rhapsody another try?