This is a good review of the latest release of Napster.
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Napster 2.0
REVIEW DATE: 09.14.06
BOTTOM LINE:
Already the music-subscription champ, Napster has established a Web presence that?s free, fun, and ideal for discovering new music.
PROS:
Three free plays of every song in the Napster library; no software or registration required; cut-and-paste Web link for songs; dozens of prefab playlists you can stream instantly.
CONS:
Low-quality streaming for nonsubscribers; no videos, radio stations; a few tracks play only 30 seconds for non-subscribers.
COMPANY:
Napster
EDITOR RATING:
By Rick Broida, FamilyPC
Napster is free again—sort of. No, you can't go back to swapping MP3s with strangers—that ship got scuttled in 2003, when the service went legit with an iTunes-like music store. What you can do is stream songs in their entirety from any Web browser—no client software required. No subscription, either. The songs play free of charge—well, three times each.
Welcome to Napster 2.0, the migration to the Web of the service's mammoth song library—over two million tracks, ac-cording to the company. This isn't exactly revolutionary; AOL Music Now and Rhapsody recently made similar moves. So how does Napster's effort compare, and what does it mean for subscribers?
Just to clarify, Napster is still very much a subscription service: $9.95 per month for unlimited streaming and downloads to your PC, $5 extra for the To Go option (which lets you copy downloads to compatible portable players). Those are competitive rates, though Virgin Digital and Yahoo! still charge less for similar goodies. And if you're doing more than listening to streams, Napster's client software (currently at version 3.7 and just as polished as ever) remains in the pic-ture—it's still the tool subscribers use to download tracks, rip CDs, build playlists, and the like.
For nonsubscribers, however, Napster 2.0 is decidedly bookmark-worthy. The site itself shares the attractive blue-gray look and straightforward design of the Napster client, and it puts no barriers between you and the free tunes: Just browse and listen. You don't have to sign in, sign up, or even install a plug-in (which Rhapsody requires).
There are catches, of course. The biggest one is bit rate: Songs stream at a measly 32 Kbps. They sounded better than I thought they would, but it's still in the AM radio league. What's more, you can play each tune just three times (down from five when Napster 2.0 debuted in April); if you want to hear it again after that, you'll have to subscribe or buy it outright (for 99 cents). This is annoying but understandable: If you could listen indefinitely, you'd have no incentive to subscribe, and the music labels would undoubtedly cry foul (not a new experience for Napster). Needless to say, the la-bels have fully sanctioned the new Napster, so you can listen without fear of legal recrimination. Even so, couldn't the service at least bump the streaming bit rate for nonsubscribers to 64 Kbps? (At least subscribers get to listen at a robust 192 Kbps.)
Of course, the idea is to let you sample new music in full, not just in 30-second snippets—the industry standard for pre-view clips. And on those merits, Napster is nice indeed. Unfortunately, I discovered that for some tracks, 30 seconds is all you get, despite promises to the contrary. That's a label-imposed limitation, Napster says, but it strikes me as disin-genuous. Fortunately, these abridged clips seem to be few and far between.
Napster's pop-up player, which works equally well in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox, packs in a scrollable play-list that features album art, a search option, and buttons for buying the track, album, or a subscription. I'm bummed that the playlist isn't interactive, though; you can't jump around to specific songs (you can skip back or ahead one song at a time). But I like Napster's innovations: The player includes a one-click e-mail-this-song-to-a-friend option and an in-stant-play link that you can copy and paste into a Web page, blog, e-mail, or whatever. Rhapsody recently introduced a similar feature, but it just lets you link to artists, not individual songs.
Napster 2.0 doesn't offer music videos or radio stations (Rhapsody has both), and the community features (a wiki-like section called the Narchive) touted at its launch have gone AWOL (Napster says they'll reappear in the coming months). That's unfortunate, because what I saw of the Narchive was quite promising..
For now, we'll have to settle for free music. Napster 2.0 is the icing on an already tasty cake (the subscription service garnered an Editors' Choice from us last year). Although the anemic bit rate for free songs is disappointing, it didn't di-minish my overall enjoyment of the site and its musical feast. I checked out new albums and artists, made some qualified purchase decisions, and even considered restarting my subscription—exactly what Napster had in mind, I suspect.
