Napster Review

Full Napster Review

Summary

Reviews of Napster are generally positive. However, there really are better music download sites on the market today for the same price. Also, while its overall quality satisfied most of our reviewers, they were generally turned off by glitches and incompatibility issues.

Good, but Not Outstanding Music Download Site

Our reviewers have been generally satisfied with Napster. The overall quality of this top music download site is fairly good. Sound quality, music selection, ease of use, download speed and flexibility are all more or less on par with top names likes TheMusicDownloads, eMusicNova or iTunes.

But, Napster is not an outstanding music download site. For instance, while Napster has an integrated media player, you'll have to import all of your files manually. This could represent a significant amount of time depending on the size of your music collection. Although the absence of an automatic media import function might only be a slight annoyance to most users, all top music download websites on the market today include this time-saving function.

While the product is generally satisfying, it is not only unimpressive, but there is much better on the market today for the same price.

Glitches and Mac Incompatibilities

The main problem with Napster is that, as a browser-based music download solution, it comes stricken with browser incompatibilities, bugs and quality issues.

For instance, Napster offers a free music streaming service to its users. Napster is able to offer free music online by inserting advertisement through its web-services.

While the idea is good in itself, especially because it costs absolutely nothing for the consumer, glitches and incompatibility issues plague this free music streaming service.

Firstly, Napster's free music service doesn't work on the Mac-based browsers Safari and Internet Explorer. Moreover, Napster's free music streaming service is not without its glitches on Firefox for Mac, a very popular browser and important market share.

Furthermore, users should think twice about using Napster's free music streaming service to satisfy their daily musical dose. Free songs on Napster, available to anyone who opens a free account, can only be played a maximum of five times by any user. Plus, the encoding quality of each song is a mere 32Kbps.

Overall Napster is a good music product. The quality of its music download and playback functions are more or less on par with top names like TheMusicDownloads.com, eMusicNova.com or iTunes. But, Napster is not an outstanding product; it has many glitches and Mac incompatibilities, very limited support and online help, as well as absolutely no automatic media import function.