How to Find New Music

This is an extremely busy week so this may be the last you hear from me until after Christmas, or quickly on Friday afternoon.

I am getting a new Mp3 player for Christmas, it is a Sansa e280R which works with Rhapsody to do some pretty cool things as far as discovering music. The two biggest drawbacks I saw to my 3G iPod were the lack of a subscription service and the lack of new music discovery.

The Sansa combines an FM radio for old Fashioned discovery but also utilizes Channels form Rhapsody. These channels can be pre made ones like the House Music Channel I am listening to right now which pulls in some great background music which I have never been able to pull together. This channel basically raided the hard drives of my Friends, Jake and Jason and made a Killer playlist. You can also hop over to the best of a decade or a Genre. If you want to get real advanced you can create your own channel. I have a channel titled Comedy- Explicit in Rhapsody which is based on Lewis Black, Dane Cook, Denis Leary, Mitch Headberg, Jim Gaffigan, and a few others which delivers a solid stream of laughs which must be enjoyed with headphones at work.

I need to add one more artist to the channel but I cannot remember his name. The comedian did some stand up on Comedy Central Presents with a guitar and sang a Hilarious bedtime song to the audience about divorce. I know someone out there can fill in the blank on this one.

The subscription service is great as well because I am currently devouring music and I am paying for it which was getting expensive and the CD purchases were leading to a pile of strange plastic discs of which I had almost forgotten. They are my new friend for music purchases since I can then have a digital track with no DRM. I am fine with DRMed subscription tracks but I am more and more against DRM on digital downloads, just like Bill Gates is.

Best Buy is offering a 2 Month Free trial of Rhapsody (with Purchase of a Sansa but that is not verified anywhere.)

I will have a longer review of the Rhapsody service, the Sansa e280R, and my accessories sometime after Christmas but so far Rhapsody alone is worth it! My plan is to make a car dock which will charge the Sansa e200 series MP3 players as well as utilize a line out function.