A lot of problems with Rhapsody since last firmware/SN upgrade

[mortslim]

those are signs of Rhapsody server problems.

Here is an example of one of the Amazon Web Services that may be helpful both to Slim Devices and to Rhapsody:

"Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed components of their applications that perform different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS makes it easy to build an automated workflow, working in close conjunction with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the other AWS infrastructure web services."

"Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon’s web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations. Components of applications using Amazon SQS can run independently, and do not need to be on the same network, developed with the same technologies, or running at the same time."

Here is the link: http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/

Here is an example that is given for delivering video content (which I assume is much more challenging - relatively speaking - than audio delivery):

"For example, here is how a video transcoding website uses Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS, Amazon S3, and Amazon SimpleDB together. End users submit videos to be transcoded to the website. The videos are stored in Amazon S3, and a message (“the request message”) is placed in an Amazon SQS queue (“the incoming queue”) with a pointer to the video and to the target video format in the message. The transcoding engine, running on a set of Amazon EC2 instances, reads the request message from the incoming queue, retrieves the video from Amazon S3 using the pointer, and transcodes the video into the target format. The converted video is put back into Amazon S3 and another message (“the response message”) is placed in another Amazon SQS queue (“the outgoing queue”) with a pointer to the converted video. At the same time, metadata about the video (e.g., format, date created and length) can be indexed into Amazon SimpleDB for easy querying. During this whole workflow, a dedicated Amazon EC2 instance can constantly monitor the incoming queue and, based on the number of messages in the incoming queue, is able to dynamically adjust the number of transcoding Amazon EC2 instances to meet customers’ response time requirements."

[andyg]

Last night Rhapsody pushed a new update they hope will fix the problems. So far it appears to be working, let me know if you are still having problems.

[texmass]

I tried playing Scott Walker artist radio and it failed on the 3rd track with the 59 minute thing. I can't help but notice that it failed playing the same track it did yesterday, Marc Almond, Scarlet Bedroom track from the album Open All Night. I tried playing that track directly (rather than through the artist channel) and it played with no problem. I remember that this same channel failed yesterday on the same track so this might be something different than the validation problem you have addressing.

Restarted the channel (had to play something else first to get it to restart) and it failed on the 2nd song, different track than before.

For me the order of failure has been the following:

individual tracks or albums - rarely have an issue
playlists - occasional failures
artist channels - fails frequently but it is somewhat variable, maybe it depends on the channel or the time of day

From my standpoint nothing has changed.

[raaurora]

I streamed a genre channel for a few hours yesterday w/ no apparant problems. Keeping my fingers crossed. I didn't try the album or artist channel options.

[y360]

Unfortunately I get now:
500 Can't connect to direct.rhapsody.com:443 (Bad hostname direct.rhapsody.com)

[raaurora]

Unfortunately I get now:
500 Can't connect to direct.rhapsody.com:443 (Bad hostname direct.rhapsody.com)

Interesting. Can you ping direct.rhapsody.com? I tried from my computer and it pinged fine. If you can't, maybe a firewall is getting in the way?

[mortslim]

On three separate occasions today, I attempted to listen to three separate albums picked randomly. On all three occasions, the music stopped playing before the album completed. On one occasion it stopped after the first song, and on the second album after the fifth song and on the last album, the music stopped after the second song.

Whatever changes were made, there are still problems with Rhapsody.

Its good that someone is looking into this but it seems more work needs to be done.

[Dr Dirt]

I don't get it-- Rhapsody that is.

Also I don't get why any SB user would pay any money for the Rhapsody service. Good thing it was free for the first 3 days (yeah, 3, not 30 days, since that's as long as I could get any Rhapsody service at all). I think they should be paying me for the grief and waste of my time they've caused. All the other services I've tried work flawlessly for me.

I certainly would not have purchased this Logitech product if I had been aware of and read the past month's worth of discussion on this forum.

And just how do the reported Rhapsody "problems" and "issues" translate into "just doesn't work at all"? I think "issues" a gross hijack of the English language meaning of the word. "Failure" is a more appropriate word.

In an unsuccessful attempt to get Rhapsody service, on a daily basis I've tried every fix suggested here and elsewhere over the past 20 days. Some of these seem to fall into the category of "Spin naked three times counterclockwise under the full moon while reciting a druid chant backwards."

Can anyone here explain why Rhapsody doesn't work on my Squeezebox Duet (and many other Duets apparently), and who is responsible for that failure? (Using plain English language.) If the answer is "No, it's currently unexplainable" I'd appreciate just hearing a "no".

[Howard Passman]

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=57304

I'm curious to see how many with issues will add their names to this..

Howard

[y360]

It's ok now for the most part, but they still have intermittent problems where the playlist stops and the track continues silently with strange time counters