On Thursday, I decided to succumb to a temptation try a free seven day subscription to Napster.

As I've previously mentioned, I'm rather prejudiced against any sort of audio output from my laptop.  When I'm working, I don't want any adorable sound effects or musical snippets issuing forth.  These protestations not withstanding, I am actually quite fond of listening to music,* as long as the experience is strictly voluntary.

Several factors combined to impel me to give Napster a try:  the high cost and inflexibility of the compact disc format; repeated requests from nonprofit professionals for help in understanding the concept of downloading music from the internet; the realization that I already possessed a set of headphones that could plug into my laptop and spare innocent parties from being involuntarily subjected to any music being broadcast from my laptop.  But mostly it was  the lyrics of a half-remembered song.  I didn't want to spend real money to buy the entire CD, and although a search of Amazon.com turned up a brief free excerpt of the song, it was the wrong 30 second sample for my purpose.

Anyone who has ever been tormented by this sort of inability to remember a song lyric last heard 20 years ago will recognize that this amounted to a compulsion that could easily be rationalized as a professional duty to keep up with advancing technology.

I therefore downloaded the Napster platform (no charge) and signed up for a free seven-day trial of the subscription service.  I had to give my credit card information, but will be billed for the monthly charge, which is under $10.00 a month, only if I don't cancel before the week is over.  The registration and downloading procedures were not particularly intuitive, and it was not easy to get a human language (rather than legal language) explanation of Napster's services before I hit the button to make the purchase, but by this time cognitive dissonance had set in and I was not really thinking about possible downsides.

Twenty-four hours later, I would like to report that nothing disasterous has happened, but that (as much as I like downloading and arranging individual music tracks) I haven't figured out any really good reason that the average nonprofit or philanthropic organization needs to invest in Napster.

Here are some things that are slightly discouraging about Napster:
The sound quality of my Sony VAIO laptop does not turn out to be great.  (I can't  even adjust the bass-treble balance.) I could probably spend time and money upgrading this or rigging a line from my laptop to my stereo, but that would detract from the portability of my musical experience. Your mileage may vary.

Napster doesn't make a clear distinction between streaming audio and downloadable tracks.  The former is potentially tedious because your system needs a lot a horsepower and really good buffering to prevent the audio from stuttering.  The latter choice is potentially tedious because Napster has a tendency to stop downloading and report errors at unpredictable intervals.

The Napster search tool for music tracks is not what I would describe as fault-tolerant. If you think the musical act is called "Crosby-Nash" or "David Crosby / Graham Nash" (or, heaven help us, "Crosby, Stills, and Nash"), and Napster thinks it's "Crosby & Nash," you are about to endure some frustration. 

The range of choices is not all that I could desire.  Any service that charges money for "all the music you want, any way you want it" should have the complete works of the Beatles in its catalogue.  End of discussion.

Still, it's pretty cool to mix and match tracks.


*  My taste in pop music is pretty much what you'd expect from someone with my demographic profile.  My only eccentric musical interest is in Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation liturgical music.  Go figure.



By the way, the song I could neither retrieve from memory nor get out of my head was "In My Dreams," by David Crosby.  It wasn't as good as I remembered, but I feel much better now.


Technorati Tag: