So Thursday morning I ran managed to catch a Digg post right before it fell off the bottom of the front page and I’m really glad I did. It pointed me at a screencast for a new media player app called Songbird. It’s built on the Firefox platform and outside of usablity/design problems it’s awesome. It has enormous potential. I’ve already switched to it and have found it much better than my previously best option (for linux) rhythmbox.
In a related note I finally got around to checking out emusic. I picked up a card for a free trial of it at Bumbershoot, I’d heard/seen about it on digg and /., from people I know, etc. Anyway, for whatever reason the fact that Songbird linked to it made me go through the trouble of checking it out and now I’m glad I did, but the process wasn’t painless. (begin review…)
I went to their site and was greeted with a page saying try it out for free… The problem was that I couldn’t find anything on the page that would let me in to see what they had available. I finally managed to do it by going through the help links in to the main part of the site and then clicking on the browse links. I can only hope this isn’t on purpose to try to get people to sign up before they know exactly what they’re getting, if that’s the kind of business decision they’re making they’re not the kind of company I can end up behind and think it going to live up to their potential.
So after I managed to figure out they had plenty of stuff I was interested in I went ahead and signed up for the free trial and started to look around. I quickly found something I was interested in Why? (try finding that/them on google.) So I started to grab the album and all I got was a weird ass file with a .emp file extension. I don’t have a clue what exactly it is. I suppose it’s some sort of pointer for their download manager or something, I haven’t a clue. I looked around in their help (which mentioned linux, wouldn’t of signed up if it didn’t) and found out they had a download manager for linux so i grabbed it and pointed it at this emp file. It prompted decided to do absolutely nothing. I asked it to restart the download and this time it at least told me it failed. So I gave up on this crappy download manager pretty quickly and started looking around trying to figure out if and how I could just grab the plain mp3 files. I dug around for a bit and didn’t find anything and was about to give up and cancel my trial. When I started looking around in the account section in order to cancel I noticed a setting about the download manager. There was a way to disable it, that sounds promising. Sure enough as soon as I changed that setting and went to an album page all of the links became mp3 and I was able grab the files and listen to them fine.
So the quick summary. It has great music, it’s reasonably priced, the site is pretty decent and has good discovery, but they seem really bent on making it hard to figure out what they have before you sign up and they don’t really seem to want to make it easy to get the stuff you’re paying them for. That doesn’t sound promising, but I guess after I put up with the 30 minutes of hassle I’ll be good to go from here on out. Anyway, we’ll see how long I stay interested and keep it going.