HOWTO: Get Rhapsody to Work on Ubuntu Linux
I subscribe to Rhapsody, the music service. I have no Windows machines any more (except for my work laptop), but that’s OK: Rhapsody has a web client, that (barely) works on Macs. Recently, I decided to
try to make it work on my Ubuntu machine.
I use Ubuntu at work, for non-work things. Since I telecommute, I have no local IT support, to fix computer diseases, and so I need to protect my Windows laptop at all costs: no browsing anything that I (or my company) didn’t write.
So I have a separate machine, running Ubuntu Linux, for Web browsing, music playing, video watching, etc., as well as a backup server.
Everything works great, except that the Rhapsody plugin for Firefox wouldn’t function.
It was a bit of a slog to make it work, which I lay out here, in hopes that others will find it useful.
I have Firefox 3, on Ubuntu 8.04, which has some stupid alliterative name like Doofus Douchebag, or Rancid Roadkill. Whatever. I love Ubuntu, and make relatives use it, since it requires little support.
So I pointed Firefox at Rhapsody.com, hoping that I’d soon be hooked up with the latest Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan .
The stated requirements seem pretty mild:
- Firefox version 1.5 and above
- glibc (gnu C library) version 2.3 and above
- 350MHz Intel Pentium II processor or equivalent
- 64MB of RAM
- 4.5 MB available disk space
- 16-bit sound card and speakers
Well, OK, I thought. 64 MB of RAM seems do-able.
First problem: the .xpi file that installs the Firefox plugin failed. It appears that there’s a bug in the installer: it worked with Firefox 2, but doesn’t work with Firefox 3. But that’s OK: I found help here, which showed how to use wget to install the plug-in:
cd
cd .mozilla/plugins/ wget http://forms.real.com/real/player/download.html?f=unix/rhapxRhapsodyPlayerEngine_Inst_Linux.xpi&install=rwih unzip RhapsodyPlayerEngine_Inst_Linux.xpi
Great! Now I can play my headbanger music! (note that you can also install to /usr/lib/firefox/plugins).
Not so fast. Every time I tried to play a tune, the plugin would authenticate, and then load the song, and then say “Playing”… and then say “Technical error.” Damn!
I tried lots of things. I found suggestions that I killall esd (that is, terminate the Enlightened Sound Daemon). Turns out I don’t have one of those, or artsd, either.
After reading the threads here, I decided to install firefox 2. This works OK, even though I already had Firefox 3 installed: Ubuntu is happy to have both versions of Firefox running at the same time. Just use the Application > Add/Remove tool. The only funny thing is that they both use the same plugins/cookies/user settings.
Firefox 2 installed the plugin OK (it turns out that this was unnecessary, since both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 look in the same folder for plugins).
Oh, boy! I’m gonne get my Bill Frisell now!
Not so fast: Firefox 2 loaded the plugin, authenticated me, loaded the song (Bill Frisell’s Shenandoah)… and then keeled over dead. Crash!
Repeated attempts yielded the same results.
Finally, Mike at Real support suggested that I had toxic cookies left over from my earlier attempts. Skeptical, I did the whole Clear Private Data thing in Forefox, including cookies.
It worked! Sadly, it killed all of my Firefox 3 saved cookies… but that’s OK. I defeated this stupid thing.
There have been many reports of the Rhapsody plug-in fighting with other applications over control of the sound card. One person suggested that this uncooperativeness with other sound devices was a deliberate attempt to stop users from capturing Rhapsody audio from the sound card. Me, I think of the old saying: “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.”
November 21st, 2008 at 11:05 am
Hey man, thanks for this – worked great. I am a Ubuntu / Linux newbie and this is going to save my life. I can’t live with Rhapsody.
November 22nd, 2008 at 9:34 am
You’re welcome, AM. After all this, Rhapsody’s still shaky on my system.
The level of effort that the developers are willing to invest in non-Windows platforms is pretty annoying. The plugin for the Mac is BAD: it randomly drops dead, often after only a few minutes. And there doesn’t seem to be any interest in fixing it.
Given the cost of Rhapsody, and the disregard that they seem to have for folks like us, I’m thinking of dumping it for Pandora, Last.fm, or any of the other nine million online music sources.
December 1st, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Update from Rhapsody support:
There’s still no support for FireFox3, according to Victor at Rhapsody online support. From our online chat:
So I think that about wraps it up for me and Rhapsody.
September 27th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Looks like this post is coming several months after these posts, but I had no problems hooking up with Rhapsody as of last week (September 2009) using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope and Firefox 3.0.14. After a few attempts of loading Ubuntu, I found that all I had to do was to go to Rhapsody’s web site IMMEDIATELY after I loaded Ubuntu and got wi-fi networking going, then load the .deb Adobe Flash Player 10.0.32.18 right after that. That worked perfectly. Once I had Rhapsody and Flash installed, I finished re-connecting my network resources.
Although I can use the Rhapsody and the pop=up radio interface, one thing that still won’t work is the client-based Rhapsody software I used to use in Windows. I tried installing it in Wine, but it’s just too weird. I lose the ability to transfer music to my LG Dare, but that’s okay — I just use a different Windows machine for that.