Inadequate streaming quality and selection
Written: Aug 21 '04
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I signed up with the Napster on-demand streaming audio service for the free trial. Napster's streaming sound quality was OK, but not something I would want to listen to all day. Compression artifacts were very noticeable to me. Apparently Napster streams at a lower quality (96 Kbps) than most of the other services.
I was also bothered by the complexity of the user interface. Some tracks are only available for purchase. So, you sometimes see tracks listed but you can't play them! You have to carefully check the button to notice it says "Buy Only" - which means you can't play it!
Napster only displays artists and tracks it has in its catalog. This can be misleading because you think you mis-typed/misspelled something when you get no search results. Similarly, Napster may only show 3 albums for an artist even though that artist may have 10. So you can easily be misled to think that the top album in the list is the latest release when its not.
On the positive side, the response times for searching, navigating and streaming songs was very good. I also liked their Billboard top songs listed by year feature.
Bottom line: the quality was not up-to-par, and the streaming catalog is limited compared to the purchase (download) catalog. After canceling my Napster trial (which was very easy by the way!), I signed up for Real Rhapsody and was much happier with the quality and selection.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
springhill19
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Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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