Juvenall Wilson

Yesterday, I actually did what I never thought I would do. I, Juvenall Wilson, gave money to Napster. That’s right, I’m now a monthly subscriber to the service. Shameful, I know. In my defense, however, there was both a purpose and plot behind the “acquisition”.

Since they relaunched, they’ve been pushing their music rental program. Basically, for $10 a month, you can download almost any song they have in their database and listen to it on your computer for as long as you are a subscriber. The downside here is you you can’t burn the file to a CD or even plug it into your iPod because it uses a DRM crippled WMA file. What’s worse, in my opinion, is you are only allowed to have the file on three computers. So nerds like me who find themselves on several throughout the day are basically shit out of luck. Once your subscription is up, the files no longer work and you’re back to nothing. Clearly, this isn’t a great option for a serious music fan and it would take a whole new view on the subject to get me to change my mind.

Enter my Eastern Michigan University attending girlfriend. As it turns out, Napster has done the really smart thing of targeting both it’s main audience and those most likely to pirate music by offering a huge discount to their rental service. So instead of $10 a month, every month, students have the option of getting the service at a flat rate of $20 for about 8 months or so (until the end of the spring semester). This was enough to completely change my mind on the subject of getting an account. Not that I thought any better of what they were offering, but the price just sounded more along the lines of what I would be willing to pay. So yesterday, I had my girlfriend abuse her student status and hook me up.

The reason for all of this is simple. The project I spoke of a few days back is, as it stands, a music review site that will require me to have access to a lot of tunes on the cheap. Since Napster’s rental service fills that need by giving me both new and old songs at the click of a mouse, it’s the perfect solution for the focus of the site. As an added bonus, I am able to “convert” these protected WMA files into MP3s that I can take with me by simply recording the output of Windows Media Player. The program I’m using gives me the ability the speed up each track so a 60 minute album can be converted in about 10 minutes (since the program isn’t free, I’m not going to drop a plug).

Anyhow, when we finally did the signup yesterday, we were more than unimpressed. The first bad sign came when we were unable to download the client from Napster directly. This forced us to use CNet’s download.com (which oddly enough links to the Napster servers for the file) just to get the install. Once I got it on my main box, the damn thing wouldn’t even load the login box. It would take 10 minutes to show than time out or give an error when I would try to login. This went on for about 12 hours (even now, as I type this, I’m still having troubles getting in). Eventually though, I managed to access the service and pull about 1.3GB down. Having a 6Mb connection sure does make this much more fun than the old, old days of Napster and my 56k.