Real Rhapsody running under Linux
I subscribe to Real’s Real Rhapsody music service. I really enjoy it, and like the fact that I have their entire music collection at my fingertips. Their music search utility is easy to use, and works great, and I can build my own music library/playlists.
My desktop computer at home runs windows XP, so everything is fine there. However, when I work on campus at UMD, my workstation is running Suse Linux 9.1 (My choice). Well, I wanted to be able to listen to my Rhapsody playlists while working on campus, so I figured out how to get Real Rhapsody working under Linux. Here is how I did it:
Getting Started:
To get started, you need to have a computer, already running Linux, with X-Windows working, and wine working properly. This means that you already have to have wine set up with your fake windows folder etc. With Suse 9.1, I just installed wine via YaST, which configured wine, and created the fake windows directory for me.
I had to update to the latest version of wine, so I downloaded the updater, and upgraded my wine to the latest stable version. This upgrade changed the way the fake windows directory was linked to, so I had to create some symlinks in the ~/.wine/dosdevices folder.
Install Requirements
Real Rhapsody will not install into wine by itself. The installer will error out because it cannot find Windows Media player 7.1. Well, Windows Media Player 7.1 requires Internet Explorer. So we have to install Internet Explorer and MP7.1 first.
For anyone who has tried getting IE and MP to work under Linux/Wine, it is sometimes pretty tricky to do so.
This is why I used the Sidenet Wine Configuration Utility. With my working wine install, I ran the Sidenet Utility and it set up Internet Explorer 6, and Windows Media player 7. It automatically downloaded installed and configured IE and WMP7 like a breeze. Once it was done, I tested IE, and it worked great!
Install Real Rhapsody
Next, install real rhapsody. You can get the installer file here. A simple “wine RhapsodyReal.exe” did it. The installer completed, created a shortcut on my desktop, and started running. I entered my username/password and was able to start playing music from my library.
Running Rhapsody
Real Rhapsody runs, but there are some issues with it. I start up rhapsody from the icon on the desktop. It takes about 30 seconds to start up (P3 866mhz w/256ram). Once it is running, it appears on all desktops, and stays on top of all windows. Minimizing it will put it down in the lower left hand corner, out of the way, but still slightly intrusive.
Not all of the features work within Rhapsody either (at least for me). I can browse the music catalog, but cannot search it. It also tends to freeze if I try adding music to my library, or clear my playlist. I’m perfectly content with adding to my library on a windows machine, and to clear my playlist, I right-click it, do “select all” and then do “remove tracks”.
The “X” also does not work to close Rhapsody, so when you want to quit the program, you need to go to console, I do a “killall -9 wine-preloader” and that stops rhapsod (since it is my only wine app that I run regularly).
I hope you found this article useful. If you have any comments, questions, or want me to add-update this with anything you find out about running Real Rhapsody under linux, please email me at amish [at] amishgeek.com
