Lazycoder

Endgadget reviews Napster to go(I told you so)

Napster To Go: Review and Features Guide – Engadget – www.engadget.com

A while back I posted about the iPod and the end-to-end experience.

People might be buying the WMA compatible players, then taking them home and having to spend 2 hours trying to find the right driver, then after they find the right driver and get the software they find it’s easier to manually copy over the files themselves rather than use the software or the software crashes a lot (I’ve had that problem with MusicMatch). Then maybe sometimes the drive just disappears 1/2 way through the file copy and they have to unplug it and plug it back in before their PC recognizes it again.

Now check out the first two paragraphs in the Endgadget review.(emphasis mine)

Firstly, you?جø¬?ll need to make sure your Napster To Go compatible player is actually ready to go. We first tried the service with a Creative Zen Micro player, only to find out the device wasn’t compatible without a firmware upgrade. However, the only compatible firmware was in beta and laden with warnings of possible instability and malfunction ?جø¬? not the most welcome information for someone who’s just plunked down hard-earned money for a player. As it turned out, the firmware upgrade we performed ended up crashing in the middle of the process, after which the player was unrecognizeable by either the Creative software, the operating system, or any version of the firmware updater we threw at it. The Creative support site was about as helpful as if we’d called up the local hardware store to ask for advice, and it was a Saturday so no live phone support (60 days of which came included with the player). Instead of waiting around until Monday we opted to return the unit and give the iRiver H10 a shot instead.

The iRiver H10 was recognized by Napster to Go right off the bat with no need for a firmware upgrade. However, after setting up the software and spending time downloading a whole bunch of tracks, we discovered something very annoying ?جø¬? they wouldn’t play. The playhead would just sit at 00:00 for about 10 seconds or so, then advance to the next track, only to keep repeating the process. The MP3 files we had uploaded to the player from our own collection worked fine, but none of the WMA files downloaded from Napster To Go would play on the device.

I’m not going to say “I told you so.” but I’ve been working with Microsoft PC products pretty much since Microsoft has been in existence. That’s the standard experience when dealing with new products and the Wintel platform. Hell, I just bought a USB keyboard with an extra USB port on it for use at home. I plug my USB trackball into the port on the keyboard and plug it into my USB port on my PC. They keyboard will routinely drop off and cease to function, only to re-appear a few seconds later. It also drops keystrokes and then repeats the last keystroke it received. When I plug this same keyboard into my iBook it works perfectly.

So, if you’re trying to use Napster to Go with the iRiver H10, and you’re seeing the same problem, check out this thread and follow the second set of instructions (there are two on the page) to reformat your player, then re-transfer your NTG files and try again.

Not to echo the Apple “switch” ads, but who wants to spend Christmas morning hunting down drivers and firmware updates?

The biggest drawback to the Napster software was that it was prone to crashing, and not infrequently. After a few hours of usage, the software would either completely crash, or transfers to the player would stall in the middle. How much of the bugginess was a result of the interaction with the iRiver H10 in particular is hard to say, since we never did get the Creative Zen Micro to work with the software for comparison. Sometimes there would be a dialogue box thrown up to say “the player has stopped responding” while other times the “transfer to device” pane would just stop incrementing the percentage transferred. Disconnecting the player and restarting the software would fix the problem, but it was annoyingly too frequent, on each of the three machines we were using it on.

So this piece of software has two jobs, one to play and organize music and the other is to transfer the music to a player AND IT CAN’T EVEN DO THAT. It can’t handle a file transfer over USB. Maybe they should just embed a tiny FTP server in the players and use the FTP protocol? At least it supports resume. Compare this with my experience after one week with my iPod shuffle; I plug it in, hit “autofill” and click on the “eject shuffle” button when it says it is done.

Another amazing thing about NTG:

t wasn?جø¬?t unusual to run across occasional ?جø¬?Buy Only?جø¬? tracks, but it didn?جø¬?t really seem too overwhelming.

So, you really CAN’T download their entire library if you want to, just some of them. What do you want to bet that the big hits of a particular artist will be “download only”. Nice.

We just could not say we had an easy time getting Napster To Go working with two out of the three players Napster is strongly promoting as the optimal devices for use with the service ?جø¬? and we’re geeks

Amen, I’ve said this about a LOT of Wintel technology. Every time I spend two hours diagnosing an internet connection problem or try to update my video drivers because a game required newer drivers. It’s one of the reasons I moved my gaming over to console based games rather than PC games (although World of Warcraft was too tempting to pass up). Unless Napster to Go and Microsoft can clean up the end-to-end experience, iTunes will wipe the floor with them… again… if they release a subscription service.