Why I’m Unsubscribing from Napster To Go

Posted on May 20, 2008
Filed Under Blog, Gadgets, Music |

I’ve been a huge supported of Napster’s “To Go” subscription service for a long time now, been able to fill up my 60GB Creative Zen Vision: M was at first quick, easy and worked, but over time niggling problems have crept in.

The software is terrible, still, I hoped maybe it would improve, but on both my PC at work running Windows XP and my home desktop running Vista stutter and clunk along, and hanging altogether for a few seconds at a time happens near enough every time I use the application to download music and transfer it to my MP3 player.

Sure it does the job, but after nearly two years of using the service I would really like to see some improvements, and they just never seem to come. At first I just put up with it, but now I have a fairly large collection of music I find myself wanting to search and be more selective in my choices of MP3 downloads, and that means using the software more, which in turn means I encounter the issues more frequently.

More recently I’ve also found a couple of albums I listen to vanish, and so become unplayable as the DRMed files are unable to get the updated certificate data, which is really annoying when it was an album I listened to a lot - Since I have the CD I just ripped it to MP3 myself, but that’s effort.

That aside, I was debating canceling anyway to save the money towards my travels at the end of the year, but I had talked myself out of it, but now there are just to many annoyances with Napster to make it worth while, even the announcement they are allowing you download 6 million DRM free music tracks doesn’t interest me as I only use the music subscription service.

That said, it has served me well enough while I’ve been using it, and I’d suggest anyone thinking about using an MP3 subscription service give the trail a go and see if it works for them, but I just find that it has failed to keep up with me expectations, and unless they come up with a significant update to the software, I wouldn’t use them again myself.

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