Well, the Qtrax site is back to allowing downloads of the client software, which has turned out to be powered by the Songbird Media Player, already in v0.2 beta release. While the point-to-point unlimited “free and legal” downloads haven’t been enabled just yet, I am pleased to say the media player performs well.
Using a bunch of stuff I’ve ripped off my CDs for play on my shoddy 1GB MP3 player, the sound quality is as decent as any time I’ve played the same tracks in RealOne or WMP. The nice bit, though, is how slim and fast the app performs. The download is only just over 9MB in size, installs quickly and when I pointed it to my “My Music” folder that contains a modest library of just over 300 ripped tracks, the program read and incorporated them into the My Library area so quickly, I wasn’t sure it had really worked; but there they were, ready to play.
Those are the positives.
On the downside, the media player has not yet successfully connected to the Qtrax site to enable any of the “artist-related information” searching promised in the initial beta release. Perhaps the servers are overwhelmed, though, and this’ll settle down once more folks have the player downloaded and installed.
Another downside is the player’s hit-and-miss performance on picking up artist and album information. For example, I get sermon CDs at the house of worship I attend and like to rip them into MP3 format for convenient listening; even though I manually entered all the information for those CDs and it works in RealOne and WMP, Qtrax’s Bluebird player is extremely hit-and-miss on capturing manually-entered information like that, which leads to my files being far less organized than I prefer in Qtrax.
Even so, the app feels light, fast and responsive and considering the increasingly bulky performance of RealOne and WMP, not to mention iTunes, Qtrax Songbird is at least in the running from a performance standpoint. The black user interface feels clean, usable and smooth, though rather light on features so far, and I haven’t tested it out to see if I can use Qtrax to rip songs off my existing audio CD library, though it doesn’t appear to be a feature that’s enabled just yet.
In the final analysis, Qtrax Songbird Media Player v0.2 beta has a long way to grow before it lived up to its promise, but it’s a nice start. Only time will tell if Qtrax is actually the 25 million-plus downloadable songs, “unlimited free and legal” app that it boasts it intends to be, but so far, so good. At least the music player performs well, and the ads? Well, they don’t bug me yet, or affect playback performance, so who cares?
