Qtrax — Ad-Supported Music With iPod Compatibility? 131
dnormant writes in with a note about QTrax, a 5-year-old startup that just announced deals with all the major labels to provide free, ad-supported music downloads. The new wrinkle is that, though the free tracks come encumbered with Windows Media DRM, QTrax claims that they will be playable soon on iPods. Wired's assumption is that the company is on the verge of a deal with Apple to allow use of its FairPlay DRM in place of Microsoft's. (Apple hasn't licensed FairPlay to anyone so far.) The AP coverage of the story assumes that QTrax has found a way around FairPlay on the iPod, and if so, that its solution will break the next time Apple updates iTunes.
"Assumes"? (Score:4, Informative)
The part that irks me (Score:5, Informative)
Deals not done (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Startup? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The part that irks me (Score:4, Informative)
Songbird as a platform is making leaps and strides right now. If you're a Mozila-developin' fan of the project, we're in the middle of a Top 40 extensions contest to port cool extensions from Firefox. Come by #songbird on irc.mozilla.org or check us out at http://songbirdnest.com/top40 [songbirdnest.com] . Win cool schwag! Meet great people! Hack on something fun!
As a daily-use media player we're still not quite there yet. We are, after all, only at version 0.4. Still, many people are discovering all the cool things that having an extensible framework in your media player enables you to do.
Squawks,
-pvh