News Napster ups UK track count ahead of Sony, Apple launches

Is Kitty running scared of the big boys comming to town? This from El Reg:

Napster UK today said it had upped the number of songs available from its online music service from 500,000 to 700,000.

The company said as much at its launch last month, but the move puts its track catalogue well ahead of competing UK-based music services.

Napster UK has all the major labels in its bag, along with many of the UK's leading independent labels, courtesy of its tie-in with indie trade body the Association of Independent Music (AIM).

More here

 

I decided today to give this service a try as they have the free 7 day trial thingy so what have I got to loose eh?

Well. So far I must say I'm impressed.
Streaming over the internet from their servers results in only marginal quality loss that really isnt that noticable if I output to my stereo and the fact that you can download the songs in play-back only for free which is cool but from my understanding if you un-subscribe you loose the licence to play these songs back and thus all your downloads are invalid and can not be played untill you re-subscribe but really that isn't a bad deal, unlimited music for £9.95 a month and you dont really even have to take up your HDD space by downloading it, just stream.
You could think of it as a customizable radio station.

Good stuff.

The only gripe is that all the songs are in wma and I really dislike (read: hate) the codec format.
Naturally anything you download in play-back only is well.. play-back only and cannot be burnt to an Audio-CD or transfered to another device/system but thats to be expected. They want you to buy the music at 99p per song or £9.95 per album though if I were to buy the album for unlimited use I would rather pop along to play.com and buy it for probably the same price and get all the album covers and a nice case to boot.

Ah yes.. almost forgot. Don't expect the songs to playback in Winamp, it just won't happen as the WMA decoder in Winamp(5) doesn't support the DRM licences properly and will give you errors. You have to play it back in the Napster software or Windows media player.

The napster software interface is very similar to iTunes and is by no means without its problems, that my be just me who has problems with it though. I'm picky about the way things are designed and what makes something easy to navigate but its not unuseable by any stretch.

Even though they bost 700,000 songs there is still no Linkin Park or Evanescence to be seen (although I own the albums this is no problem) it's still a big shame that with all those songs they can't get some of the most popular alternative artists out there.

A search for Linkin Park will however bring up some close alternatives such as Disturbed, Static-X, Staind, Adema and various others.

Still it's a top effort and I hope to see more artists join it soon. Maybe if more people purchased this way the price of an unlimited use licence would come down per song.

I rate Napster: 4/5