Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
Napster’s Back
I just got home from a rather LONG day at work, and saw an email informing me that “Napster’s back!” I’ve downloaded it, installed it, started it up, logged in (after filling out a mysterious dialog asking me for my “pressplay” user ID, even though I’ve never used “pressplay“. I guess I was supposed to know that’s what i was really signing up for when I pre-registered on Napster.com…
I’m playing around with it… I’m not overwhelmed… The UI is “gratuitously non-standard” (which, sadly, seems to BE the standard these days) and is very cluttered. It also flickers like crazy any time you resize anything or move around in the system. I’ve gotten A LOT of “can’t connect to server” errors – though these are probably just launch-related glitches. There are some unnecessary dialog boxes (such as one warning you that you can’t clear a playlist when one of the songs is playing — so, just STOP the stupid song, sheesh!). There are a lot of UI areas with web-style verbose instructions spelling out how they work (a really lame substitute for good design which has seems to have cropped up from the recent trend toward HTML-based application layout engines).
I recall from the launch demo that this was targeted as an application you’d use to manage your complete MP3 music library regardless of where you got the files, but I don’t see where I’m supposed to go to rip a CD.
Oh, and the “Napster Device” looks cheesy. It’s definitely no iPod. Yet they’ve got the balls to charge more per Gigabyte than the iPod. Um… If there’s ONE angle someone could use to steal HD-based MP3 (err… WMA?) device market share from Apple, it’s cost. Oops.
But it still looks like there’s some interesting stuff in here… A “history” of streamed tracks, similar to a browser history. The ability to “save” other members for later perusal of their collections… I think I’ll be playing around a bit more tomorrow. But early indications are that I’ll stick with Rhapsody for “exploring” and iTunes for buying, archiving, and organizing. One thing is 100% clear, Apple has nothing to worry about here.
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