Napster to Go

Cafe Society
1

Tuesday I got my Best Buy Reward Zone e-mail stating that I got $55.00 in gift certificates from the purchases I had made. (I recommend this if you’re making big ticket purchases at Best Buy, but for the average shopper, don’t bother. It took a month and a half after spending $2K there to get this little perk and that includes the $10 fee for signing up for the program). I did a bunch of hunting around but didn’t find anything that tickled my fancy until I was just about to leave. In the overstock shelves they had a Napster 128MB MP3 player for $49.99.

I had been reading about the Napster to Go deal of $15 a month for unlimited downloads to your MP3 player. I figured the MP3 player at this point would be “free” and I could do the trial subscription to NTG program and life would be good.

First things first. I didn’t check to see if my new MP3 player that was made by Napster would be compatible with NTG. It apparently is not. All of the tracks with the DRM that come with the NTG program didn’t play on the MP3 player but tracks I ripped from my CDs did. Also, my (still functioning) iPod is not compatible at all with this service and I doubt that it ever will be.

The good news is, you don’t need a compatible MP3 player to use the service. (I’m not sure why they don’t advertise that point). You can download them to your windows computer and play them through Windows Media Player 10. Here’s the other thing though, according to the requirements you need Windows XP and WMP 10 to use this software. While I am on XP, my MP3 files are in default setting to get played through WinAmp. The files I’ve downloaded via NTG are compatible with WinAmp. Word.

I’m digging the speed of its downloads as well. I’ve got cable internet and it goes at close to 500kb/s for two songs at the same time. Much faster than iTunes. I’ve found the song selections pretty good, although, iTunes sometimes has the stuff that is missing on Napster. With NTG you can hear the full song/album before buying it (instead of the 30 second snippets on iTunes).

The one niggling problem is that not all of the songs are part of NTG. Some artists are “buy only”. Some albums are “buy only” as well. I can understand that to an extent, but what’s really odd is that some full albums have one track that is buy only while the rest are included in the plan. That’s a bit frustrating (as well as the selections for these are pretty random too, not the expected “hit” off of the record).

Then there’s the news about the work-around the DRM. That’s got me a bit worried because it could mean an end to this program. :frowning:
All in all I like it. I do spend a lot of money on music so I like this service as a way to fully preview an album before buying it. It’s definitely not for everyone but I dig it.

This post has pretty much been a rambling review of it, but I’m wondering if anyone out there has been using it as well, what ya think of it, or if anyone has any questions about it.

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Really? The commercial for ntg shows an iPod as an example of a player that can be filled. One thing that I’ve wondered is what happens to the songs on your mp3 player if you cancel the service. Does the mp3 player automatically delete the songs each month to stop people from signing up long enough to get songs then cancel the service? What’s napster’s selection like? Is it comparable to itunes?

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As for the iPod, I haven’t seen it as compatible yet (and actually, I haven’t tried to import the DRM protected songs to my iPod, I’ll give that a go tonight and see what happens.) According to Napster’s website tho:
Many iPod owners subscribe to Napster to listen to over 1,000,000 full-length tracks on their PC or home stereo. They can purchase tracks at a Napster subscriber discount, burn their music to CD and import it into iTunes to put the music on their iPods. Now there’s a better solution:* they can subscribe to Napster To Go and get a Napster To Go-compatible player that they can fill and refill without paying 99¢ a track.** * I took that as a “No” that it wouldn’t work with iPod and it wasn’t listed on their compatible devices page either.

According to the website, the songs expire (lose their temporary license) should A)let the monthly subscription lapse or B) not connect the MP3 player to Napster for a month. I’m assuming that the songs will be unplayable at that point but remain on the harddrive. (I downloaded a song with a temporary license like this before and when it expired, the song remained on my computer but Windows Media Player refused to play it).

Napster’s song selection is good. I’ve found many albums that weren’t on iTunes (and vice versa). Napster claims to have 1 million+ songs and that seems about right. I’ve found some obscure American stuff on there but when I looked for obscure Canadian stuff, I came up short (John Southworth,Connie Kaldor, Ferron, etc). Then again, I didn’t find them on iTunes either.

It’s got a “free” two week trial too. You can sign up with a credit/debit card or paypal as well. After that, cancellation is supposedly easy in that you can switch to “Napster Light” which is just an iTunes equivalent (No subscriptions, just the ability to buy at whim.) Per Napster, that’s done online. (Wait for a pit thread if that’s not right. I dislike having to call a company to cancel a subscription that I started online).

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The WMA files that I downloaded via the Napster to Go program are blocked from iTunes as protected files. iTunes usually converts WMA files but it couldn’t convert these. I also bought a couple songs from Napster as well (songs that weren’t covered in the NTG program). These songs couldn’t be moved over to iTunes for the same reason (but they could be burned to a CD and then ripped.

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iTunes can convert unprotected WMA files. Protected ones – like those sold by Napster or other Windows-based services – are SOL.

As for the recently-discovered Napster “crack,” it’s just the geek equivalent of running a line-out from your speakers to a recorder, and then re-encoding the recording in MP3 or whatever. As Steve Jobs noted back with the introduction of the iTunes Music Store, all copy-protection schemes are ultimately doomed to fail.

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I love my Napster to Go service. I confess that I was a little confused on how it actually worked in the beginning, but I fully understand it now, and I love it. Granted, it’s not for everyone - if you only buy/download a handful of songs now and then, it’s probably not the program for you, but if you’re like me, (who had a library of over 3K songs) then it’s well worth it. In the first few days of belonging to the service, I downloaded over 300 songs - songs I’d looked long and hard for before, and could never find. Every Pink Floyd track that was available for download is now mine for the hearing.

The transfer rates are absolutely incredible. I was thrilled with how quickly everything came down. In a handful of minutes, I can download several albums. Excellent.

As for the DRM workaround, it would take a long time for it to be worth it to anyone - you still have to pay the monthly fee to get the songs in the first place. Then you have to actually record the songs. Does high-speed digital dubbing exist? (I can’t think of a reason for it, so I don’t know if it’s out there or not). It just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

The really good aspect is, it gives a chance for some, uh, random person, with, say, a library of 3K songs, to be able to ensure that all 3,000 of them are legal copies.

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…until you miss a payment. :wink:

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Yes well, good point… luckily I have a good contingency plan :wink:

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Er, what I mean is, some random person with 3K songs would very likely have some sort of contingency plan.