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.
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