Qtrax: The Most Jacked-Up, Disappointing Launch In Years
By Ken Fisher
January 29, 2008 - 08:15PM CT

We've been chronicling our experience and take on Qtrax, a new "free" P2P service that leverages DRM to push ads at users. Originally slated to launch this last weekend, the whole thing came unraveled when it was revealed that Qtrax didn't even have the licenses it needed to open its doors.

Then they did the inexplicable: they posted the beta client 24 hours ago and opened up the service. The only problem? You can't download or play any music from the service. You download the client, install it, go through a registration process, and shazzam: hurry up and wait for "Downloads coming soon!" Installation was not easy, either.

I cannot determine why, but when Songbird searches my disks for audio tracks to add to its built-in library, it causes my RAID array to flip out. The test machine was an nForce 4 board with NVIDIA's RAID, and once Songbird started scanning, Windows Vista and then the NVIDIA monitoring tool both reported that the RAID array was inaccessible.

I then had five minutes of "RAID Access Failure" notifications before it stopped. Running diagnostics, I could find nothing wrong with the array. With all that behind me, I hopped on the service to check it out. Performance was painfully slow; browsing the Qtrax service via its Songbird-based player application is an exercise in frustration.

Ars Technica
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