HollywoodIdiocy.com

Although they had a splashy launch and huge promises of making available every song ever recorded in the known universe past, present and future, Qtrax has, at least so far, failed to deliver on all the hype and promises. But I’ve discovered a site that pretty much delivers most of what Qtrax promised, and in rare cases, more, only instead of still wrestlnig with record labels over download rights, this company is already up, running and delivering the goods: free, legal music downloads … right now.

I’m speaking, of course, about SpiralFrog.com. Like Qtrax, you have to download a player/song manager tool in order to use the service. Like Qtrax, SpiralFrog.com asks you to endure commercials and other ad content while downloading. Like Qtrax, SpiralFrog.com is funneling most of the funds from their ads back to the artists. The biggest difference is, Qtrax doesn’t offer a single song for downloading yet, either free and legal or otherwise. By contrast, SpiralFrog.com offers over 1 million songs and videos already, with more added all the time as they continue the types of label-by-label, artist-by-artists negotiation deals that Qtrax is only just beginning.

One million songs to choose from is superior to no songs to choose from, no matter how big Qtrax’s promises may be. Until Qtrax delivers, SpiralFrog.com is a far more relevent choice, because it’s available now.

Here’s the deal with SpiralFrog.com. There’s no membership fee. No per-song download fee. No hidden charges. No credit card information being given out. They don’t make their money off your pocketbook.

What IS going on with SpiralFrog.com is that you can only download one song at a time, during which you are treated to ad impression refreshes, which is what helps SpiralFrog.com earn income that, in turn, goes to the hard-working artists whose labors of love are downloading to your desktop and, usually, into your MP3 player.

Downsides? There’s only a few.

1) The DRM software added to each SpiralFrog.com song requires you to synch to SpiralFrog.com no less than once a month, or the songs will stop working until you do.

2) SpiralFrog.com’s still missing a lot of major artists and songs, though they’re working on it.

3) SpiralFrog.com is neither iTunes nor Zune compatible. However, the service works with most other MP3 players, including the new Panasonic P10, which has iPod Touch-style functionality. So there’s that.

That’s not a lot of downsides. In fact, staying at a cheap hotel Las Vegas-style is more of a pain.

In the end, while it may not be as huge as Qtrax promises it will be, one day, for now SpiralFrog.com’s 1 million song-and-video catalog is about 1 million selections more than long-suffering Qtrax users have to choose from right now. SpiralFrog.com’s a great choice; it delivers today what Qtrax can only promise, yet not deliver.

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?

Qtrax, the “free and legal” unlimited music download service scheduled to debut yesterday (Sunday) hit a snag when at least four of the biggest music companies - Sony BMG, EMI, Warner Music and Universal - put the brakes on by announcing Monday that their deals with Qtrax were not yet finalized.

Talks between Qtrax (and parent company Brilliant Technologies Corp) and major music labels are said to still be ongoing and the company released a statement stating it believed such details could be addressed quickly so that the debut of the Qtrax service could go forward; however, for now the downloadable software needed to access the Qtrax service has been blocked by the site from further downloads until the service can fully debut.

The company is making several promises beyond offering “25 million songs, free and legal.” One promise is that the company will offer an iPod solution by April 15 (which is also, ironically, tax day in the US), which may come as a surprise to Apple, whose iTunes music service uses a proprietary codec that is exclusively licensed to Apple; it’s unlikely that Apple, currently charging 99 cents per tune, would offer its codec to a competing music service that would undercut its prices by 100 percent.

Thankfully, one solution Qtrax will allegedly offer is to correct roughly a decade of mistakenly attributed music. For years, since the advent of the original Napster service, many music download tracks floating around the Internet have attributed songs to the wrong artist. One notable example is Weird Al Yankovic, who has been credited for many parody songs he’s never written, including works by political satirist Paul Shanklin. Qtrax is also promising not only album cuts in its lineup, but rarities and live performance tracks as well.

While it still sounds too good to be true, Qtrax may be delayed, but is apparently not an Internet hoax.

EMI, Universal and Warner Music - the same companies that only a few months ago charged Minnesota native Jammie Thomas the equivalent of $9,250 per song for every song she’d allegedly downloaded for free - have changed their mind about free online music downloads. According to the Times Online (UK), those companies as well as many other recording companies, have decided at last to embrace file sharing technology.

The reversal came as the music industry announced the introduction of Qtrax, a digital music service that promises a catalog of 25 million songs that users can download and keep for free with no limits. The catch if that Qtrax’s digital jukebox will feature some advertising - kind of like radio ads - and both artists and record labels will be paid based on download popularity. Nearly every song available will allow unrestricted use through the service. If Qtrax takes off, it could pose a serious threat to Apple’s iTunes digital music store, which charges 99 cents per track.

If this all ends up being as good as it sounds, maybe music aficionados can finally spend their hard-earned sawbucks on something other than a Brandi Carlile single; like maybe some wholesale fashion jewelry or an HDTV.

The only question remaining is whether Jammie Thomas is going to be let off the hook by the men in music-industry black suits.