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Napster 2.0 Launched In UK Today

added 20 May 2004 at 15.56

The first of an approaching swathe of major commercial download services arrived in the UK today as Napster 2.0 - the legal version of the infamous file-sharing software that pioneered peer-to-peer music sharing - has been launched by parent company Roxio.

With an initial catalogue of 500,000 tracks (rising to 700,000 in the next few weeks) Napster will boast the largest online catalogue of any legal download site.

Xfm listeners are well catered for although the service isn't yet entirely comprehensive - out of ten random samples from Xfm's daytime playlist we found seven available for download (Napster missed The Streets' 'Fit But You Know It', Franz Ferdinand's 'Matinee' and, surprisingly, Morrissey's 'Irish Blood, English Heart').

For a monthly fee of £9.95 users can stream any track in full, or download songs for local listening on one PC only. By paying 99p per track, both subscribers and visiting users can burn tracks to CD as well as copying them to one of a number of supported portable devices (crucially, Apple's i-Pod is not among them). Tracks are encoded in the popular Windows Media format at a healthy 128kbps, delivering near-CD quality.

In a nod to the brand's origins as a community-based, peer-to-peer technology, there's also a significant community element to Napster, with users able to view friend's playlists and see what other users with similar musical tastes are listening to.

The lack of restrictive Digital Rights Management on purchased tracks, enabling users to enjoy the same personal use rights as they do with shop-bought CDs, is a welcome improvement on existing UK sites such as mycokemusic.com, which impose strict limits on burning and copying tracks even once they have been paid for.

The lack of MP3 support is a likely stumbling block however, as it leaves Apple's popular i-Pod unsupported. Napster tracks can still be loaded onto an i-Pod, but they need to be burned to a CD by Napster, then seperately loaded into i-Tunes, a laborious process unlikely to appeal to many. With Apple's own i-Tunes music store rolling out a similarly-priced service in the UK in the next month or so, it'll be interesting to see how the i-Pod's well documented iconic status measures up against Napster's impressive catalogue and slick interface.

At the time of writing there were no Metallica tracks available on Napster 2.0.

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Dave Collyer

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