Subverting QTrax Ads in 5 Minutes or Less (and a Songbird Comparison)
This is a follow-up post to the on-going set of QTrax articles I’ve been posting. If you don’t know what QTrax is, start here or here. If you don’t know what Songbird is, start here.
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.
