Running Real’s Rhapsody in Linux


Every once in a while I have to put something actually useful up here. I just spent a while trying to get Rhapsody to work in Firefox 3 under Ubuntu 8.10. Having an entire music store at my disposal is one of the things I miss most from my Windows machine when I need to run something under linux. There is a web version of Rhapsody that should run under linux, but I kept getting “Technical Issue” errors in the Rhapsody plugin every time I tried to play a song. It would tell me to restart, but would never work, even after a restart. It turns out I had an old version of the Rhapsody plug in laying around, and didn’t have a proper version of Adobe’s Flash player installed (the new version of the web-based Rhapsody client just uses Flash). Apparently, Rhapsody either doesn’t, or can’t, check the version of the plug-in installed on your machine, and if it’s the old version it will try to use it and fail. So, to get Rhapsody working first go to the following two directories

~/.mozilla/plugins
/usr/lib/firefox/plugins

and make sure you delete any file with the name nprhapengine.so. Then, in Synaptic (or whatever package manager you like) make sure you’re running the actual official Adobe version of Flash 10. Ubuntu, being produced by ideologues (didn’t think I’d be able to write about linux without taking a shot, did you?), makes it hard to install software built by evil monolithic companies. So, if you have Flash installed, it’s probably a buggy “free-as-in-doesn’t-work” version. Do a search for “adobe flash” in Synaptic and uninstall any currently installed free versions. Then, install the flashplugin-nonfree package. (If you don’t find that package, leave a comment and I’ll help you make it available to Synaptic.)

After that, restart Firefox. Rhapsody should now work using their excellent Flash-based client.

(By the way, I was able to get the full Rhapsody client running in WINE, and was even able to play 30 second clips. However, it wouldn’t let me login, saying that cookies were being blocked. If anybody has been able to overcome that, I’d love to hear about it.)


10 responses to “Running Real’s Rhapsody in Linux”

  1. I don’t understand the point of Pete’s comment. Is he miffed because you were bashing Ubuntu/Linux/both?

    I thought resolving annoying technical issues like using Real Rhapsody to run in Firefox 3 is why people use Ubuntu/Linux. Frankly, I don’t know why anyone would want to work that hard. I know I don’t. I just want to play games. And watch porn.

    Alain

  2. Thanks for the tip about flashplugin-nonfree. I have been running Ubuntu (which in general I like) but have always had trouble with the Rhapsody Flash player. Switching over to the official Adobe Flash plugin has fixed all my problems.

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