Qtrax goes live, disappoints!
Until Saturday I was really excited about Qtrax. It all made sense, 4 music labels, 25 million songs, free music. And then it all went downhill. Reports came in that the music downloaded was going to be DRM-laden and could not be used on any other software music player or portable music players. Come Monday, the launch was delayed for quite a bit and various reports came in that none of the music labels had actually signed a deal with QTrax. Things weren’t looking so good.
But I’ve finally managed to grab my hands on a copy and to tell you the truth it’s far from impressive.
The installation went smoothly but that’s primarily because the app itself is based on QTrax. 
One you launch it, you need to make an account and verify it. Once logged in you can clearly see that it’s a Songbird clone with a skin of it’s own and the interface is plastered with ads, right from a banner on the top to ad boxes on the right hand side. Even if you add your own music to the library the ads continue to be displayed. I just take solace in the fact that at least they aren’t flash based ones and when you click on them they open in a new tab. 
Still, you see more than 9.6million tracks with 2500 users well it can’t be that bad. You may search for tracks in the web browser tab which returns quite a few results, but no downloads. That’s right, downloads aren’t available yet so the number (9.6m) absolutely makes no sense.
Play around it for a while and you realize it’s a poorly put together combination of an open source media player, a web browser and a music portal. The P2P element seems irrelevant for now. It would be too soon to judge how the service does, but its future seems pretty bleak from here.
Tags: drm, music, p2p, qtrax