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. In over an hour trying to use the site, I experienced nothing better than a 50% success rate trying to pull up pages or conduct searches. It took me 15 tries to "validate" my registration.

"It's beta," you might say. Sure, they call it beta (version 0.2), but it doesn't even begin to work. How this is meant to generate excitement for Qtrax is beyond me. It seems like yet another colossal mistake from the Qtrax crew.

The search function, for what it's worth, did turn up several hits on queries for popular artists. That's where the fun stops though, because you can't do anything else with it.

Just before press time, the player reported that there were over 9.6 million songs on Qtrax and more than 18,000 users logged on. Qtrax claimed that they would have more than 25 million tracks.

Since posting this, the service has gone kaput, reverting back to a generic Oracle Application Server page. It did this earlier in the day, too, only to return several hours later none the better. This time, I won't be holding my breath for something better to come out the other side.

I can't recall a launch this hyped that failed so miserably in recent years. None of the key pieces are there—the licenses, playable music, well-tested client code, the web site itself—yet they opened it to the public. Ernest and Julio Gallo would not be pleased.