A Quick Comparison of QTrax & Songbird

For those interested, this is a side by side comparison of QTrax vs. Songbird in the application, which still isn’t allowing downloads but it’s easy to see how it will work in both. Let’s get right to the screenshots:

You can see that the only major difference between Songbird and QTrax is that QTrax re-skinned the play controls to give more room at the top for banner ads. Looking further into the app you also notice that they did a similar job with the library screen to make room on the right for ads as well. But with Songbird working perfectly on the same service (so far), there must be something that the QTrax app must do to deal with this, otherwise, why do I need to deal with the ads when I could just, not?

Another advantage to just using Songbird is that Songbird actually works on OS X, Linux, and other platforms. Why the hell doesn’t QTrax?

Oh, and even if they have something up their sleeves, it’s all right there exposed in the app, since they used XUL in order to write their Mozilla-like extensions…

Removing QTrax Ads

The QTrax service isn’t even functional yet and I’ve already managed to remove their ads. That doesn’t say much for this company’s ability to succeed with this ad-based business model. Frankly, if I was an advertiser or record label, I would probably back out of the deal as quick as possible if I saw this.

Like I said in the previous article, QTrax is really just a bunch of Firefox/Songbird extensions plugged into Songbird without any modification to the source (that I’m aware of). I’d love to dig deeper and confirm that the source has not been touched, but that will have to wait. For now, we can easily just dive right into the XUL that they used to right their ad-adding skin and take it right out.

Let me first point out that there are about 500 different ways to disable the ads in this thing. The simplest would be to just remove the extension. I’m only showing one more complex one just to show that even if the extension added something really cool, we could still work around it.

But here we go. Just load up the extension folder in the QTrax program files folder and go to any of the .xul, .js, or .html files and mess around. You can pretty much undo whatever you don’t like and keep what you do.

I’m waiting to see if QTrax actually thought this through somehow on the server-end… but even then, it would be very difficult unless they actually modified the binaries. I can’t tell if QTrax is really dumb in not realizing how easy they made it to subvert their ads, or really sneaky in trying to make an app that will secretly not be a pain in the ass to use, unbeknown to the labels.

After playing with the anticipated QTrax beta, I have quickly discovered that QTrax.. is Songbird. Not just based on.. is.

At midnight tonight, QTrax will be unveiling what can potentially be a radically new business model for downloading music online. To be fair though, the business model is in no way innovative. Offsetting costs of membership-free sites with banner ads is about the oldest trick in the book. The difference in this case is the fact that the major labels are actually on board with this idea, as Wired recently reported.

This actually looks pretty exciting. You can still hear the loud roar of those people against DRM claiming that this is not progress, but I think we should see how DRM would actually be able to limit the portability of music that has already been made freely available to anyone over that network. Considering that they plan on making iPod compatible in the near future, the music provided by this service should not only be able to move from machine to machine (by sharing it, at worst case), but from music player to music player. Without having seen the application in action, I can’t imagine how DRM in this context could do much harm.

Update 1 (01/28/08 1:00 AM): Seems like QTrax might be in some hot water with some final attempts to start the service, as reported by Silicon Valley Insider. At 9:57pm, QTrax was still in discussion with WMG trying to finalize the deal. This might explain why there is still no beta available to download. Will they be able to pull this off?

Update 2 (01/28/08 2:00 AM): The guys over at GameDrift seem just as anxious as me to get my hands on this stuff and play. They claim that the launch has been moved to midnight PST (instead of EST) and are going to be waiting to report on this live, so check it out.

Update 3 (01/28/08 12:00 PM):

“The future of Qtrax, a new file-sharing website which promised legal downloads of over 25m music tracks, is in doubt today after three of the four major record labels denied giving the site permission to use their music.” – source: Guardian Unlimited Music

Update 4 (01/28/08 6:13pm): The guys over at GameDrift did a little digging and found a link to the 0.2 beta version of QTrax. Keep in mind, downloading from the service is still disabled, but if you want to check it out, you can either install or check with GameDrift for their overview.

Update 5 (01/28/28 10:20pm): QTrax officially released the software from this download link (link from the download page). The site is currently acting up, but hopefully downloads will begin when it starts functioning again.