Web In Depth

I have been looking around the web and have seen the announcement of the launch of a new music Free and legal p2p music download service called Qtrax was going live on Sunday midnight eastern. That’s about 8 hours from now. What really caught my eye was that this service is totally legal, and they have signed on all four major record labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group).

So what’s great about this, it’s that at last the music record companies have realized the futile pursuit of trying to stop people from getting free songs. I mean we have been able to get what we want always with whatever restriction was put up. That need of the fans was the reason for the huge success of sites like napster and why music search engines and Bittorrent site have thrived. S with this release the industry has aligned itself with the need of the fan, which is always good for all parties.

So what are the good and bad features?

I really can’t say as I have not yet downloaded their music player. From what I hear it is based on the popular songbird player. This is good as it has loads of usability features, but the cache is you have to use it no other player as the ads are placed on the player. This time around artist will be compensated, which is a good thing that never happened in other P2P networks.

The best thing is it is totally free (How cool is that). The worst is it does not allow songs to be played in ipod. For all fans of Mac, the Mac version will be released in March. I will cover this topic in more detail after I have downloaded the player and given it a try.

RSS Mixer

Well some times you come across some application which is more cool than useful. I am not clear if RSS mixer fall in to this category. it is close, but I think it has its use.

What is RSS Mixer?

It is a site were they allow you to add a list of RSS feeds and then mix them up so instead of showing each feed separately as in RSS players it mix all the feeds together. After that you have the option of getting it as a RSS feed, an Apple Dashboard widget for Mac only, a Web widget to put up at your site and an iPhone version.

So what I did was test it out. I added a few blogs blogging (another area that I follow closely) and hit the mix button. Here I made the mistake of adding the blog, but what is required is the feed URL. This can be a little pain, but as you all know, this can be found easily by right clicking and saving link location of the feed in the blog. I decided to test both RSS feed and Web widget.

The Web widget option just gave you a set of cord to paste on your blog, which display the feeds in a smart looking box. Check it out on my sidebar.

The RSS feed option took me to my bloglines Feed Reader so that I can add this as a feed.

What I will do is compile a set of sites that you should follow and put them up as a widget so you can check them out while staying at my blog.

So my dear reader let me know what you think of this little widget and does it add value to my site. Let me know what you think, and download Qtrax and check it out.