Rhapsody integration

Well now that we have streaming music as an option, one interesting improvement I would like to see is for subscribers who use Real's Rhapsody service to be able to stream playlists from that service (as it is all streaming music).

I am not sure how strong Phillip's relationship still is with Real, so this may be a dead issue, but Real has the most compelling online music service (not to be confused with their online iTunes competitor which is also very nice). I would love to be able to go into Rhapsody and set up a playlist and then have that be what is streamed to my land. Anyone could listen, but only subscribers could use the service to set up playlists.

Hell I would even pay a premium on my Rhapsody account to use it. I have used Rhapsody for about 2 years, and I am more of a fan of it than ever. They recently integrated into the Prismiq Media Player - so I have access to hundreds of thousands of songs from Rhapsody on my stereo, which is very cool. I would love to see the same level of integration into SL.

You can easily use iTunes with SL with Slim Device's Slim Server. It was designed to work with a radio connector for iTunes, but can be used to set up a stream with playlists off of your Mac. Macworld Magazine nicely explains how to do this here.

The problem is that this still requires you to use your own bandwidth for streaming, while the Rhapsody integration would not. Also, any purchased music in iTunes does not work with Slim Server, as Apple keeps those files locked pretty tightly (because we are criminals you know, even though we paid for the music). You can easily stream now using Shoutcast and Winamp. The point of the suggestion is to provide access to the amazing music library available in Rhapsody - which has the most complete library of any online music subscription service.