Today I canceled my Rhapsody subscription, making my move to Zune official. It's an odd move, given that I don't own a Zune. But I use my portable MP3 player much less often than I used to, while I listen to music on the computer for hours every day. So what really matters to me is the software and services for the computer. Microsoft just updated their software to 3.0, and they have something called a Zune Pass that allows me to listen to any song in their huge catalog as long as I pay my monthly fee ... and I am a big fan of subscription services.

The Zune catalog seems comparable to Rhapsody's ... people claim that this or that service has a better catalog, but my experience has been that they all have everything except the Beatles, plus a few other acts like Led Zep, Metallica, or the Eagles where you can only get the music if you pay for specific downloads. Suffice to say that so far, I feel like I'm hearing just as many songs on Zune as I did on Rhapsody as I did on Urge as I did on MusicMatch (yes, I go through subscription services with some regularity).

The software is what matters. Zune software, like most software of this kind, has lots of things I consider bells and whistles, that other people might find essential. It has a few quirky additions, which are fine with me. But the essential thing is that the software keeps track of my music, lets me access the catalog as if it were my own, and plays without crashing. Is it perfect? Far from it. But it's my choice right now as the best of the subscription services.

Rhapsody ... I keep going back to them, I keep leaving them, that should tell you something. They have the right ideas for the most part, when everything is working right it's a pleasure ... but it's rare that everything works right, the software is clunky and buggy, and when they "fix" the software, or even come out with new versions, they go sideways at best and backwards at worst. One of the more recent updates added the ability to look at pictures from your hard drive, which is nice except I don't need that function from my music-playing software, the software already feels bloated, and there were existing problems that needed fixing. As I have ranted to customer support until they are sick of me, their software does not allow you to sort playlists, so if you create a playlist of 2000 songs (I know, what kind of playlist is that, but believe me, I have them), the only way to reorder them without resorting to kludgy workarounds is to move songs around the list by hand. Want to know if you've added that ZZ Top song to the list? Get your reading glasses, because you can't sort by artist, you can't sort by song, you can't sort by album title, you can only scroll through the list until you find the track you are looking for (or, if it's not there ... well, you'll do a lot of scrolling to find that out). I am not a programmer, but even I know that sort capabilities are among the most basic of functions for any software that utilizes database information. Not for Rhapsody, though.

And so, I'm a Zuner. I have no emotional attachment to Zune, nor did I to any of the other services I've tried and abandoned ... well, to be honest, they abandoned me, going out of business, allowing me to return to Rhapsody for another try. MusicMatch? Gone. Urge? Gone. Rhapsody? Still there, still plugging away, still committed to the concept of subscription music ... and still aggravating enough that I'm jumping ship yet again.

I haven't checked, but I don't think Mog-o-Matic recognizes Zune, so I won't be able to update my catalog and recently played lists. But, to be honest, Mog-o-Matic has done nothing but crash on my machine for some time now, so it wasn't really doing me any good, anyway.