This Super Bowl commercial cought my eye... it seems to good to be true.

I checked out their website, and you need a "compatible" MP3 player to take advantage of the deal. iPODs are NOT compatible, so that sucks for a lot of us, including myself.

I don't really understand how they'd know what player you have. They frequently mention "fill and re-fill" your MP3 player as much as you want. I wonder if you have to use their program to manage you MP3 player or something.

$15/ month for unlimited downloads would be a killer deal though. I'm curious to see if they are other limitations- their site doesn't seem to have that much detail.

Will Apple do something similar? This could get interesting...

They're also giving away 5gb mp3 players when you sign up for a year of service:

$15 x 12 mo. = $180 (still less than you would have paid for an iRiver, I think)

They'll turn some heads with this. Looks like you do have to use "Napster To Go": http://www.napster.com/tutorial/about_ntg.html

It'll be interested to see how long Apple holds out if this gets popular - if they keep closed, they may end up making the same mistake all over again and get locked out of most of the market.

If you burn music cd's of their encoded files using their software, it puts the track information on it too, so then ripping the cd to regular mp3's is easy.

(if you want to bother burning and ripping stuff for free.)

is this a way you could use "napster to go" without having an "approved" player?

i still feel like there must be another catch.

damn. deal is dead, but i still might buy that player. that iriver looks awesome.

dead?

dead as in the original free iriver h10 deal is no longer available. it said the first 1,000 and it seems like the first 1,000 have signed up. now you get 3 months free if you buy the player which is a much crappier deal.

do you lose more audio quality by going mp3->.wav->.mp3??

i doubt there will be an audible difference, unless you go to an mp3 bitrate less than the original file.

Probably. Not sure how much.

Yes, just like recompressing a jpeg image will continue to lose quality. It might not be much if you used the same bitrate, but it definitely will.

On this deal in general, since Napster is blocked from work, are these mp3 files or some sort of Napster-specific file type? In other words, will these work on my Ipod? Because if so, I am totally there for $15 a month. Or are they going to pull an "Emusic" and change the deal once a bunch of people have signed up and make it so you can only download some crappy low amount of files for your $15/month?

I guarantee you won't be able to transfer napster-downloaded files to any program/device that they don't want you to. They probably won't exist as actual MP3's on your hard drive.

Nevermind, I just answered my own question: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119146,00.asp

128kB/s copy-protected WMA files? That you RENT (in other words, they stop working if you don't keep paying for them month-by-month)? I don't think so! I proclaim this LAME.

I knew it was too good to be true. bastards!

Yeah - I would've done this in a heartbeat, as I have qualms about downloading illegally, and $1/song in the ITunes music store is a bit pricey...

yeh, i was about to say... $15 to download or to "download..."

I was hoping to clean out their whole site in a month.

I wonder if you could still burn them using their software.