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Qtrax launches with just a few songs but lots of headaches

19 June 2008 23:24 by Rich "vurbal" Fiscus | 2 comments

It's official. Qtrax, arguably the most infamous music service ever (even before they ever offered a download) has finally launched. That's the good news. If all you were looking for is good news now would be a good time to stop reading.

The rest of the story is "launch" may be too strong a word for what Qtrax has acoomplished so far. While it's possible to find a few albums, there don't appear to be any that are complete. From what I was able to find the content appears to be solely from Universal Music Group (UMG) despite the recent announcement of a deal to offer EMI's music.

After a searching for a short time I was eventually able to find some songs to download. The process went smoothly enough until I tried to play them. The Qtrax player gave me an error saying it needed to be re-installed. Being naturally skeptical I double checked by trying to play it with Windows Media Player. It turned out I needed to upgrade Windows Media Player and install some additional hotfixes from Microsoft.

After getting through all that I was finally able to reach the point where the Qtrax client would no longer give me errors when I tried to play a song. Unfortunately it didn't actually play the songs either. Windows Media Player, on the other hand, had no problems. After uninstalling and re-installing twice, and being assured each time by the installer that there was an old version of Qtrax still on my computer, I finally got the songs to play - most of the time. Occasionally I get an error that it can't connect to the license server.

The bottom line is Qtrax has a long way to go before it's ready to be anybody's music service of choice. Between the limited music selection and frequent DRM related errors you'll end up with more frustration than music. Playback is certainly smoother with Windows Media Player, but since Qtrax gives you files with names like 'UMG_audtrk_00602498695678_01_013_906.wma' you'll also want to use WMP's Library feature if you want to find a particular song.

Permalink to this article | Topics: MP3 & Digital Audio Online music services

Music industry veterans see the upside of album leaks (12 July 2008)

Cross your fingers - Qtrax is launching again (12 June 2008)

Qtrax and Universal Music Group announce a deal for free music (6 May 2008)

Qtrax client finally available for download - but don't expect any music (28 January 2008)

Qtrax misses launch time - do they actually have a product yet? (28 January 2008)

Qtrax launches today with free P2P music downloads (27 January 2008)

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Discuss this article!
chaos_zzz (Junior Member) 20 June 2008 12:02
qtrax is a great concept, i hope they fix thos bugs, msot ppl won't install twice, update ...etc [ + quote]
mspurloc (Member) 21 June 2008 12:46
When I tried this back in January, they were using Songbird as the core, with an Oracle 10g application server. The software setup was so bad, just running the install got me to their server. DIRECTLY to their server. If this keeps up, they're going to lose whatever startup capital and agreements they had. [ + quote]