Service: My experience with Napster-To-Go, part 2

If we take the To-Go portion out of equation, how does Napster do in general?

Let me start with its weaknesses:
1) Poor selection compared to Rhapsody in the genres I like (jazz, blues, classical, metal) Lots of artists have none or only few songs available. For example, Jimmy Bruno and Jimmy Raney aren't exactly household names but they are well represented on Rhapsody, not on Napster though.

2) Poor user interface: it just ain't user friendly. For example, on some artist's page, the top pane (list of album) is too big and makes the bottom pane (list of song) too small. Users like me are more interested in the bottom pane, which allows me to pick songs to download. Another examples are cryptic radio station names like "Crossroads." You would never know if you're not a blues fan already. Doesn't it discourage users to explore music they are not familiar with?

3) Poor classification/information:
For example, "Top albums" of Blues are Confessions by Usher and #1 by Destiny's Child!
And there is no consistency: following a certain navigation path you may see John Coltrane filed under Blues. Everytime I click on Top Artists under Blues I see a different list. Sometimes the album has a "download album" link next to it but I found that even if it doesn't say so, songs from the album might still be available for download when I click the album to drill down.

Nevertheless, it does have some nice features:
1) its radio feature actually generates playlists instead of streaming. Why is this a good feature? It allows listener to keep a record of what has been played so that (s)he could download all or some of them in a shot later on.

2) In addition to the "radio station" Napster created for every user, you could build custom station based on all songs in your library or your current playlist. This is more flexible than the more common way of setting up custom station based on artists/genre.

3) This is just me being nostalgic: the download window really reminds me of the good old days of the original Napster :P

The verdict? I don't think I'd switch to Napster since it charges the same as Rhapsody (and more than Yahoo) I do hope Napster will improve 'coz more competition in the digital music business could only be a good thing for consumers like myself.

Service: My experience with Napster-To-Go, part 1

Almost a year after last time I wrote about Napster-To-Go, I finally get to try it out (free trial of course) with my newly acquired Sandisk Sansa m240, one of the cheapest PlaysForSure Subscription compatible player out there. (Sidenote: I bet a lot of people would be surprised that Sandisk is No.2 in US MP3 player market They did it by building solid and competitively priced products instead of hype. I think there's something to learn from their approach.)

Remember I wrote the service sounded exciting? I still agree with that, but the keyword is the quantifier: "theoretically." Practically speaking, I ran into these problems:
1) sometimes I got errors for no explanation, during downloading of songs to my computer or transferring to the player.
2) songs are transferred to the player very slowly, much slower than copying DRM-less MP3s using Windows Explorer. I bet the overhead for handling the DRM (digital right management, or copy protection in layperson's term) is pretty big.
3) the Napster client cannot tell what is loaded on my player consistently.

To summarize, this is the exact opposite of good end-to-end experience like what you get from iPod + iTunes I am not sure if these problems are Napster only or it is universal across all PlaysForSure Subscription services (i.e., Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo Music Unlimited) since I haven't tried To-Go with others. (In other words, how much could they blame on Microsoft, the vendor of PlaysForSure DRM technology?) In any case, simply copying iTunes' look and feel into Napster most likely cannot make it happen.

In the next part of this series, I'll compare the non-To-Go portion of Napster with Rhapsody.