Organizing Your Music

Rhapsody has five main features that allow you to organize your music - My Library, My Channels, Mixer, Playlists and Portable Devices (mp3 players, etc).

My Library

Whenever you come across music that you want to play in Rhapsody, you see Play/Add buttons. While the play button is certainly obvious, it might not be obvious what the Add button does. The Add button adds the selected track or album to your library. All you need to do is press the button and Rhapsody takes care of the rest, automatically categorizing the selection you made.

Rhapsody will allow you to import songs that are on your computer's hard drive or any other storage device connected to your computer. This is convenient if you already have a library of sorts that you want to bring into the Rhapsody environment.

Follow these steps to get started building your own library:

1. Spend a few moments adding songs to your library by clicking on the Add button that appears next to the tracks or albums you are interested in.
2. Click on the My Library link.

Your library view should now look similar to below.

Now it is time to import songs into your library. I happen to have some Al DiMeola tracks on my hard drive that are not available on Rhapsody and so I want to bring them into my Rhapsody library. If I click on Al Dimeola in the Artist column, I see the following listing of Al DiMeola songs:

3. At the top left of the Rhapsody application, Selet File->Add Tracks to My Library... Locate a folder on your hard drive, USB stick or other storage device. The folder should contain audio files that you want to import. Ideally, the files should contain track information such as Artist, Track Title and Album. Rhapsody can use this information to import the tracks and organize them with your existing tracks. If your audio files don't contain that information, don't worry.

4. Now that you have imported tracks, view your library again to confirm that the tracks have been successfully imported. After I selected the Al DiMeola tracks from my hard drive, my library now shows an expanded listing for Al DiMeola.

Notice how Rhapsody organized the tracks in the already existing Al DiMeola folder and how the track listing now indicates the imported tracks. Pretty slick.

My Channels

Channels are a very powerful feature of Rhapsody. Channels are a convenient means to discover new music that you may have otherwise never came across. To get started, click the button from the main window. From here you will see channel genres, featured channels, top channels and a live radio pick. Rhapsody will even select a recommended channel based on your listening history or will allow you to create a custom channel based on your preferences.

In this example, I will show you how to create a channel customized to your tastes.

1. From the Channel Guide window, select the Create Custom Channel button as shown to the right.
2. Now simply provide a title for your channel and specify artists you like. Press the Add Artists button.
3. You will have the option to add more artists. Just continue and you will now have a customized channel! The channel info will list additional artists that you can expct to hear in your channel.
4. Now if you click on My Channels in the Sources pane, you will see your newly added channel along with any other channels you may have.

In the next section, Organizing Your Music: Playlists, we will go over one more means for organizing your music.