But every time I wanted to change songs, I had to go to another room and make a few mouse clicks on my computer. Ever since then, I’ve been waiting for someone to come up with a good, affordable remote control that lets me change tunes no matter where I am in the house.

Apple’s Remote program

It turns out, I already owned that device. It’s an iPod touch. A new program released by Apple (AAPL) in July was all it took to convert my MP3 player into a sophisticated remote control for my digital-music collection. That program, called simply Remote, runs on the iPhone as well as on the iPod touch, a version of the Apple MP3 player that has an iPhone-like touch-sensing screen and Internet-access capabilities using Wi-Fi wireless technology. Remote is available free of charge on the online App Store that Apple has used since July to distribute software for those devices.

In essence, Remote is a remote control for all music stored on a Mac or Windows PC that’s loaded into iTunes, Apple’s music jukebox software. It allows you to jump between playlists, browse artists and pump up the volume. For the program to work, you need to buy into using other Apple entertainment products.

In the simplest setup, Remote lets you control the music from stereo speakers connected directly to a PC. But it’s most useful when you use a PC to deliver audio to additional speakers around a home — say, a pair on the patio and in the living room.

Apple sells a couple of products that receive audio signals from a PC running iTunes. Both work wirelessly over a Wi-Fi home network so you don’t need to put holes into your walls to run computer and speaker wires. I tested Remote using both. One is an Apple TV, a $229 set-top box in my living room that plays digital audio and video through a standard home-theater system. The other is an AirPort Express, a $99 Apple wireless networking device on my patio connected to a pair of powered A5 speakers made by Audioengine, of San Jose, Calif. A third set of speakers was connected to an iMac in the kitchen, where I store all of my digital music. (The least expensive iPod touch costs $299.)

It was a breeze to configure the Apple TV and AirPort Express to show up as remote speakers in iTunes on my computer. Setting up Remote to give me mobile control over this array of speakers was trickier. After installing the program on my iPod touch, I couldn’t get it to work with iTunes on my PC. After 20 minutes of fiddling with the security settings for my Wi-Fi base station, iTunes finally recognized Remote. I was in business.

We all know how confusing the remote controls for TV sets and stereo systems can be. Remote, by contrast, cleanly displays all the music on my PC on the color screen of my iPod touch.

The program let me flip through artists, albums and playlists with simple finger swipes. But I was sorry that Remote doesn’t have a feature in the iPod touch called cover flow that lets users browse their music libraries by flipping through album-cover art. Apple says it may offer the feature in the future.

The software also let me easily turn on and off the music from my speakers in my kitchen, living room and patio. I could have all the speakers on at once — good for a party. The sound was terrific. The crisp-sounding $349 Audioengine speakers don’t require a stereo receiver.

Because Remote uses Wi-Fi to communicate with iTunes, I could control music anywhere around my house and backyard, which are small enough to be fully covered with a signal from my Wi-Fi base station. That’s a big plus over conventional remote controls that use infrared, a technology that doesn’t work through walls.

One drawback: The battery in my iPod touch drained overnight when I configured the device to stay connected to iTunes, a feature that increases software responsiveness. Changing the setting let me go days without recharging my iPod touch, but it meant I had to wait a couple of seconds for Remote to connect to iTunes when I started up the software — an acceptable trade-off.

Another multiroom audio product with a good remote control is the ZonePlayer from Sonos, an equipment maker based in Santa Barbara, Calif. That system has some advantages over Apple’s offerings, including the ability to access tunes from online music services, such as Pandora and Rhapsody, and separate volume controls for each set of speakers.

The Sonos system starts at $999 for a remote control and wireless receivers, without speakers, that can deliver music to two rooms.

For people who already own an iPod touch or iPhone, Remote is a good reason to buy an AirPort Express, and fill your home with music.

Walter S. Mossberg is on vacation.

• Email Nick.Wingfield@wsj.com.

But for some folks, getting the most out of these players takes too much work or too much money. Converting CDs to music files takes time, as does selecting and downloading tracks from online music services, and synchronizing players with PCs. Creating great playlists also takes time and effort. Some people prefer the old radio model, where songs are programmed by somebody else and you just listen.

Plus, whether you download songs for 99 cents apiece, use a subscription download service for $15 a month, or sign up for satellite radio at $13 a month, the costs to keep your portable player filled legally can add up quickly.

So a new kind of portable player, one for more passive and budget-minded users, is slated to arrive late next month. It’s called the Slacker Personal Radio, and its name is meant to refer to people of any age who just want to sit back and listen instead of actively managing their music.

The new Slacker players will come in three models, ranging from $200 to $300, depending on capacity. But the music they play will be absolutely free, contained in preprogrammed Internet radio stations instead of individually selected songs and albums. The stations will be automatically refreshed with new tunes via a wireless connection built right into the device. You’ll have to be near a hot spot for these updates. But you won’t need a hot spot just to hear your music, because the songs are cached on the device. And you’ll never have to plug it into a computer.

The player is tied to Slacker’s free Internet radio service, slacker.com, which is already up and running, and allows you to listen to music via any standard Windows or Mac Web browser. Using the service, you can personalize your player by selecting from over 100 canned stations or by creating stations based around any of 10,000 artists. These stations will be beamed to your player wirelessly. You can even choose which stations are loaded onto your player before the company ships it to you.

The company, a San Diego-based start-up of the same name, hopes to make money eventually via advertising on the player, and by selling an optional paid premium plan that offers some additional features.

I’ve been testing a prototype of the chunky, black plastic Slacker player, which is dominated by a four-inch color screen. It has two redundant navigation systems: a touch-sensitive strip at the side of the screen and a wheel on one edge. It provides a rich listening experience, including album art and other photos, artist bios and album reviews. The sound is good, and the Wi-Fi wireless connection worked in both my home and office.

The two prototype Slacker units I tried, however, were hobbled by bugs and glitches that the company must expunge by the release date, which was originally slated to be this month. For instance, the players sometimes failed to wake up after going to sleep, requiring a reboot. The touch strip was unreliable. One player failed several times to connect to my account. Battery life is well below Slacker’s goal of 12 hours between charges. The company says it is aware of these problems, and pledges all will be fixed.

Slacker isn’t the only portable player to offer programmed Internet stations. The Rhapsody service offers similar, customizable Internet-based stations on a couple of players. And both the Sirius and XM satellite-radio networks offer portable players for listening to their stations, although the stations can’t be customized. But all of these players require monthly subscription payments, while Slacker’s stations are free.

The Slacker Radio

Because Slacker is based on Internet radio, it has some limitations imposed by the rules governing that format. For example, you can’t specify a particular song to play, or skip back to repeat a song. And you can skip ahead only six times per station per hour. Even if you create a station around a particular artist, the station will mainly be filled with artists the service considers similar. Songs by the artist you selected will be played only four times every three hours.

The player has a “heart button” for designating a song for frequent play and a “ban” button to eliminate the songs you hate.

If you’re willing to pay, or put in more effort, you can get additional capabilities. For example, Slacker players can hold and play some of your own songs, in addition to programmed stations, if you download a free Windows software program. And, if you sign up for the premium option at $7.50 a month, you get unlimited song-skipping, no ads, and the ability to save favorite songs on the device and play them as often as you like.

But the basic idea of Slacker is to make portable listening free of effort and of service charges. If the company can wring the bugs out of its new player and if its ads aren’t too annoying, that formula may appeal to some busy music lovers.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

That’s the issue with the Sansa Rhapsody, the latest portable music player to challenge Apple’s iPod hegemony. This is the first player to be specifically designed to work with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music-subscription service, and it’s no mere iPod clone. The player, made by SanDisk, is designed to show off the Rhapsody music-rental model, which is about music discovery rather than individual song or album purchases.

Sansa Rhapsody

Like other subscription services, Rhapsody charges a monthly fee for unlimited access to millions of songs. You don’t actually own these songs, and any music you’ve rented and downloaded from Rhapsody becomes unplayable if you stop paying the monthly fee, which is $14.99 a month if you want to hear the music on both a PC and on a portable device.

But Real believes that for people who love to try new artists or hear “channels” of music, this is better than buying individual songs and albums that never expire, which is Apple’s model. It stresses quantity and variety, and for the new Sansa Rhapsody player, it drives this message home by filling the devices with music. You can play this music free for up to two months before you have to buy a subscription.

Microsoft’s forthcoming Zune player will also come loaded with a small sampling of music, but the Sansa Rhapsody goes much further. On the base, 2-gigabyte model, fully half of the storage capacity is taken up with preloaded music. On the higher-capacity models, which feature up to 8 gigabytes of total storage, 2 gigabytes is taken up with preloaded music.

The Rhapsody service itself also has been overhauled, with a new, cleaner interface. Best Buy stores will be launching a store-branded version of Rhapsody and sell the new player.

I’ve been testing a Sansa Rhapsody player for the past week or so. I’ve compared the player with Apple’s midrange iPod Nano, the closest iPod model in size and capacity. The base-model, 2-gigabyte Rhapsody player I tested is a bit cheaper: $140 versus $150 for the 2-gigabyte Nano.

The Sansa Rhapsody isn’t really new hardware. It’s a variation of existing SanDisk players, and is formally called the e200R series. But this isn’t just a marketing gimmick. Unlike previous players that worked with Rhapsody, which relied on Microsoft software, this uses Real’s own music formats and copy-protection software and is more tightly tied to the service. The player can be switched into Microsoft mode for use with Microsoft files.

Personally, I found the preloaded music more of a hassle than a boon. It included both canned playlists and channels — preprogrammed radio stations. They featured numerous artists and genres I didn’t like, or actually hated, and I was forced to delete most of them and replace them with music I wanted to hear.

Before I could do this, however, I was amazed to find that Rhapsody wanted to keep adding its own choices to my player. The minute I plugged it into my PC, the service began downloading 73 songs of its own choosing to the Sansa, to “refresh” the choices that came on the device. Real says it plans to change this behavior to ask users first whether they want such a refresh.

The player itself is small, black and good looking. It has two big advantages over the iPod Nano. First, it has a larger screen, allowing for a better display of album art and text. Second, it has a replaceable battery.

But in most other respects, the Sansa Rhapsody is inferior to the iPod Nano. It is bulkier — more than twice as thick and almost twice as heavy as the Nano. It doesn’t have a feature for playing audiobooks or podcasts, and its battery life is lower than the Nano’s. I also found transferring music to the player from Rhapsody to be slower than on the iPod, despite Real’s claims to the contrary. And when I added my own tracks to the Sansa, it failed in many cases to display the album art.

Also, after the initial 60 days, you must plug the player into your computer and synchronize with the Rhapsody service at least once a month to verify that your subscription is paid up. Otherwise, all the songs on the device become unplayable. (Rhapsody also sells nonexpiring tracks a la carte, like Apple, but that’s not its main business.)

The player does a good job of displaying photos and videos, but getting them onto the device was more of a hassle than on the iPod. You need separate software, and that software was confusing to use.

For people who don’t want to choose their own music, or who value discovering new artists over hearing familiar ones, the Sansa Rhapsody may be just the ticket. For those who place a higher value on personal choice, the iPod is better.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

But there’s a substantial minority of folks who have neither the time, knowledge, nor inclination to do all this downloading and ripping. They don’t want to fool around with any PC software just to hear music. They could just sign up for a subscription service like Rhapsody, which will stream songs to you without requiring any downloading or ripping. But that also has meant using a PC.

The Sonos controller, accessing the Rhapsody music service

Until now. Starting today, there’s a way to get access to Rhapsody’s 2.5 million digital tunes, in any room in your house, straight from the Internet — without even turning on your computer.

This new system is a time/money tradeoff. It saves you time (and what some folks consider a big hassle) in exchange for money: $999 for the basic hardware, plus $10 a month for the music service.

If you’re still reading after digesting those prices, let me add that I’ve been testing this system, which pairs up Rhapsody with the elegant Sonos whole-house music system, and it works very well. It is simple, fast and rewarding.

Both Sonos and Rhapsody were originally designed to work with PCs. Sonos is the most polished consumer hardware system on the market for taking the music that resides on a computer and streaming it to multiple other rooms of your home. It consists of a series of small music-playback boxes that connect to each other over their own wireless network. It normally relies on software you install on the computer. The system is controlled by a gorgeous hand-held remote with an iPod-like wheel and a large, bright color screen that show menus and song information.

Rhapsody, too, is typically dependent on a PC. Users pay a monthly fee to either “stream” music from its collection, or to download it for use on the computer or on a portable device. This is all done using Rhapsody’s software, or a Web browser.

But, with the new Sonos/Rhapsody system, no PC is necessary. You just connect the Sonos hardware to your Internet service, and to either powered speakers or an audio system. Then, simply click on the Rhapsody choice in the menu on the Sonos controller and you can listen to any of Rhapsody’s 2.5 million tracks.

Out of the box, the new Sonos system gives you a 30-day free trial to Rhapsody, without even requiring that you enter a credit card. After that, you must pay $10 a month.

There are other media-streaming devices that can bring Rhapsody to parts of a home far from the computer, and most cost less than Sonos. But all of them, even an earlier implementation using Sonos, require a PC.

Setup of Sonos with Rhapsody was simple. For your $999, you get two small Sonos ZP80 players and one controller. You plug one of the players into your home Internet router so it can fetch the music over the Internet from Rhapsody. The second unit can then be placed in a distant room, with speakers or an audio system, where you wish to hear the music. The two units are linked by their own wireless network, which sets itself up in a few minutes with the press of a couple of buttons.

You can even do this with a single Sonos box connected to the router or to an Ethernet cable running through your walls, if you have one. That would save you some money; a single ZP80 is $349 and the controller is $399, for a total of around $750.

Once you are set up, you just click on “Rhapsody Trial” on the Sonos controller, and you can then select songs via genre, artist and other criteria. Again, there are no files to download. Nothing gets stored on your computer or on the Sonos hardware. The music is just streamed into your home over the Internet.

There are two basic Rhapsody modes. One, called Rhapsody Guide, lets you find and play music, and allows you to “save” the songs or albums to your Rhapsody library. This is a list of songs that the system will fetch from the Rhapsody servers when you want to hear them again. The other, called Rhapsody Radio, consists of over 100 “radio stations” — preprogrammed playlists — based on genres, eras and other criteria. You can also create your own stations.

Although my wife and I aren’t great candidates for this product, because we use iPods and iTunes and have a computer hooked up to our entertainment system, we both got a kick out of the Sonos/Rhapsody package. I found myself scrolling through old rock ‘n’ roll on the treadmill, and she enjoyed a radio station of Broadway show tunes.

There are some drawbacks. Because of complex music-industry policies, a small percentage of songs can’t be streamed, yet they still show up in Rhapsody’s menus, which leads to frustration. And Sonos hasn’t been able to implement a search feature yet, which leaves you doing a lot of scrolling through menus.

But, overall, this is a very good digital-music alternative for people with a roomy budget and a yen for simplicity.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com