OpenRhap.Net

Screenshots of RhapsodyRemote on a Windows Mobile 5 emulator

aaron@openrhap.net (Aaron Murrell) — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 02:59:53 GMT

In the readme file for the 1.0 alpha you will notice that it is mentioned that the software has not been tested on WM5. I decided to give it a go and all seems well in the emulator that comes with the WM5 SDK at least. I thought I'd take a few screenshots while I was at it just to get everyone excited. If you are running WM5 make sure and download the .Net Compact Framework 2.0 first as it is not installed by default.

On a side note. The "Browse Genre" is not connected up yet (I know I know... but its an alpha release guys).

OpenRhap.Net 1.0.0 Alpha released!

aaron@openrhap.net (Aaron Murrell) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:18:34 GMT

Download the binary installation files for 1.0.0 Alpha here:

Or Download the latest source files here:

Rhapsody Remote - Pocket PC Remote control application for the Rhapsody Streaming music client.

Rhapsody Relay - Relays commands to the Rhapsody music client - you must install this for Rhapsody Remote to work

OpenRhap.Net SDK - A domain model oriented, easy to use developers' toolkit for writing .Net code that uses Rhapsody Web Services and to automate the Rhapsody music client from .Net and .Net Compact Framework applications.

I will post some more detailed information on how the OpenRhap.Net SDK is structured soon. For now, know that the main / intended developer entry points are the classes inside of the OpenRhap.Media library. With the right configuration files, your app can simply utilize the MediaCatalog and MediaPlayer classes to access the Rhapsody Web Service data and control the Rhapsody win32 client.

What is it???

aaron@openrhap.net (Aaron Murrell) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:08:18 GMT

A few months ago RealNetworks released a set of web services that allow access to the Rhapsody music service catalog; data browsing, search and RSS feeds.

When I found out that they were exposing their music catalog content through a web service, I was delighted. You see, I subscribe to the Rhapsody streaming music service for something in the range of $9 / month, and typically listen to streamed audio using an old internet connected laptop that is tethered connected to my glorious home stereo. It works great, except that I really could use a remote control!

The not so glorious end result is that to queue up the music I want to hear, I have to use another computer to remote desktop into the laptop and use the Rhapsody windows client hosted on the laptop to queue up a playlist, search for and select songs or look up artists I want to hear etc. There are some existing hardware solutions like the Sonos music system, that connect to the Rhapsody client using UPnP, but for the most part, those tend to only give you remote access to the playlists that you have explicitly created and saved - with no search functionality or access to the raw Rhapsody music catalog. This prohibits browsing music in an ad-hoc way looking for new similar artists, searching etc - which in my opinion is actually the core value proposition of the Rhapsody web service.

So now that you've heard the need (and I suspect I'm not the only subscriber who feels this way), the solution I wanted to build involved creating a "Rhapsody Remote" out of a Pocket PC that I had laying around. I knew I could set up a service on the laptop that would forward control messages to the client GUI to queue and play songs and maybe even use UPnP... but the Rhapsody web services provided the missing piece - programmatic access to the music catalog for browsing and discovering music on the Pocket PC. Rhapsody announced a developers contest recently, so it gave me an extra incentive to give it a go.

I've been working on this project for the past 2 months and in the process have ended up creating not only the pocket pc remote which you can download here, but also the start of something much more valueable - something that I am dubbing the OpenRhap.Net framework.

The value proposition of the OpenRhap.Net framework is that it provides a rich, navigable domain model for .Net developers who wish to integrate access to the Rhapsody music catalog into their .Net applications. In fact, if you take much of a look at the libraries in OpenRhap.Net you will find that I actually took it one step further and implemented the specifics of accessing the Rhapsody music catalog in a "Provider" that plugs in to a generic "Media Catalog" API. If you wanted to, you could develop other providers that use the file system or UPnP or whatever else that would be accessible from the same interface.