The truth doesn’t care what I think.
I recently installed Napster To Go and was surprised at how fast I uninstalled it. The feature-set looked great and the app itself was beautiful (I prefer the Napster GUI hands down over iTunes and Rhapsody) but once I actually used (and/or tried to use) Napster To Go, I was quickly disappointed.
Napster combines the functionality of iTunes and Rhapsody but the result is more like a screaming annoyance a beautiful offspring. For instance, the first CD I played was Sticky Fingers by The Rolling Stones. Playing this album on Rhapsody is leaves a lot to be desired because they now only offer 1 song from that CD (they used to have the full CD, bastids) . Playing the album on Napster is worse: 30 seconds into the first song, you suddenly get moved along to a 30-second sample of the next song. And this continues through most of the album as Napster tries to convince you to pay $0.99/song for the missing songs. Fuck that; I bought this CD years ago to replace the Cassette I bought years before that. I am okay with paying some fraction of a cent to The Stones every time I listen to this CD via Rhapsody but if I’m going to have to store a copy of the music locally, I’ll just rip my previously purchased CD. But at least Rhapsody is nice enough to skip the missing songs instead of ruining the whole experience like Napster does. Napster basically forces you to either purchase missing songs or create playlists for every CD you want to hear that is missing songs. Maybe I’m missing an option somewhere (the “don’t ever play 30-second samples, damnit” option) but I gave up lookin for it after a while.
Rhapsody is flawed, iTunes is flawed, but Napster is worse than either if you’ve used and like them. Napster isn’t as good as iTunes for doing the iTunes thing and it isn’t as good as Rhapsody at doing the Rhapsody thing. So what good is it?
I thought the Napster To Go feature was going to make it all worthwhile. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice until afterwards that Napster To Go requires one of about 8 MP3 players in order to work. If I had one of those devices, that would be fine, but those devices are mostly new and overprices and I doubt I’ll ever consider buying one other than the Audiovox Smartphone and certainly wouldn’t consider buying an MP3 player just for use with Napster To Go (for the same reasons I won’t buy an iPod).
So, it looks like I’m staying with Rhapsody for a while longer in spite of their constantly “revolving without notice nor explanation” offerings, their incredibly flawed GUI, their broken cross-branded versions, their lack of portability… even their Google ads are broken (the URLs don’t work because of incorrect casing vs. their case-sensitive web server). But even with all these problems, it is still the best music service I’ve tried.
well this is good to know so im still stuck with buying CDs and ripping to MP3 fine by me oh and one other reason i will avoid napster is it uses WMA ugh they say apple is makin it hard for them my ass the ipod can use MP3 why don’t all these bastards just release the songs in 160 kbps or greater bit rate if there are quality concerns cuase all the what are they called oh yeah MP3 players play whats that MP3s screw AAC screw WMA the MP3 is what should be the standard format
mp3 doesn’t have the DRM capabilities of wma and aac, so it’s not going to be a standard format for DRM’d music, the faster you realize this and get over it, the better.
If you have an mp3 player, chances are it plays wma, unless it’s an iPod. And if you don’t have an iPod, you aren’t going to be able to play aac. So given the choice between wma and aac, I’ll take wma anyday.
And if you want to make people thing “oh well, another childish, illiterate wannabe music thief doesn’t like our format,” please continue posting illiterate, childish rants like this. If you want anyone to care what you think, you should probably act like you’re old enough and smart enough to get a job and be able to buy something from them.