Rich Fiscus
19 Jun 2008 23:24
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.