Ideas for Several Improvements to Rhapsody Android and other clients/apps

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I’ve been using Rhapsody off and on for several years, and now I’m using primarily the android client on my phone, so most of my thoughts relate to that, but probably to the desktop client, etc. too. The service has lots of positives, but there are some real shortcomings that I’d love to see changed – I’d love to hear what others have to say about these suggestions (I know some have been mentioned before, so it would be great to get an update):

1. The search feature really needs to be improved so that when you are searching for tracks that have been recorded many times by many different groups you can quickly find the specific version you are looking for. Try looking for a piece of jazz or classical music that has been recorded by hundreds of artists. There needs to be some sort of keyword search where you can include the track name and artist (ex. “Caravan” “Ellington” to filter for only Duke Ellington tracks of Caravan) With Classical music it gets even worse because of generic naming like “Symphony #9” and the fact that sometimes the actual composer isn’t included properly in the track info, and the “artist” is usually, but not always, the group that performed it. It would be ideal to be able to search for something like “Symphony 9, Beethoven, London Philharmonic” for instance to really drill down into the search results you want. If you don’t spell something exactly right, sometimes you are out of luck too.

2. Rhapsody Radio should be a great way to explore and discover new music. I know this has been suggested before, but I’m baffled by the fact that the history or queue of the radio tracks isn’t displayed. If I’m doing some work away from my phone or driving in the car listening to a radio station and come across a track I really like, if you don’t have your hands free to immediately take a look at what is playing and quickly add it to your library, you will lose the chance and may not know or remember later the title, the group, etc. to be able to look it up. This stinks!

3. I think this may already have some changes in the pipeline, but the queue in the android player is frustrating due to the fact that when you have long queues of stuff (which I often do) there isn’t an easy way to scroll to the spot where you are currently playing. Try driving in your car and have to swipe your finger down several screens to search for the little now playing speaker icon next to the track so you can go to items that are close by. Some sort of “Jump to” or other redesign would really help.

4. I wish that there were ways to star or checkmark tracks in the queue so that you could do bulk actions, like selecting 10 tracks and then moving them all at once into a playlist, rather than having to go through a several step process to add each track one at a time.

5. When you long press on a track in the queue, there is an option for “More by this Artist” but there isn’t an option like “View this Album”. It takes several steps to select “More by this Artist”, then “All Albums”, then scroll to find the album that has the track you were just listening to. It would be really handy to have a one click jump to the entire album that the track comes from right from the now playing or the queue.

Well, that’s my two cents anyway – thanks!