Rhapsody is Audiogalaxy’s new rival to Pressplay. Marketing note to Pressplay: try offering free, no-strings access. I would never have thought about subscribing to the Rhapsody service, but having tried it, I’m actually half-considering it (ok, maybe a quarter). This isn’t like Audiogalaxy – as far as I can tell, there’s no burnable downloading. It’s more like a personalized radio station, with the option to program it all yourself.

There are some big problems with the service. First of all, it seems to rely on Windows Media, and so there’s no Mac version offered. The coverage is also disappointing when compared to Audiogalaxy or Napster. The service claims to offer music by 17,000 artists. That’s great, but I wasn’t pleased to see that there were no songs available by, for example, Scott Walker.

That said, Rhapsody has sleek, fast search interface, and you can search by song. So I was able to (finally) hear the first recorded vocal version of the theme to ‘Laura’ (by Johnnie Johnson), listen to dozens of great Julie London songs, etc. The real strength for me was the speed, and the ability to browse at will various recordings of songs from the great American songbook. The audio quality was generally good – the one track I had problems with, Carly Simon’s take on ‘Laura’ was terrible anyway.

The service is free until September 15th. If you’re a PC user, I recommend checking it out.