Napster recommendations

I'll have to confess that aside from the fact that I think Napster's subscription service is a good deal, the integration with Windows Media Player sucks. While having Napster features as part of WMP makes sense, the fact that it is always bringing WMP to a grinding halt has slowly been driving me crazy for the last three months. What is worse was that every time I went to check for an update it always told me there wasn't one. In the end I decided I would uninstall the troublesome cat and start from scratch.

In doing so I discovered that the standalone Napster software has been updated so I just installed that and have been using it standalone. Now I find I can still play Napster files from WMP too (well of course they just use Windows DRM), there is just no integration of the Napster browsing and download interface within WMP. So you can't click on a track, see its artist and go to download other tracks by that artist from Napster. But it turns out I wasn't really using that feature anyway - because it was so unreliable to do network issues as best I can figure.

So my recommendation is don't install the Napster Windows Media Player plugin. Just use Napster's standalone browsing tool for discovering and downloading new music. Then when you are playing music you can just do it from within WMP as normal.

You should also consider telling Napster to put its music files in a folder separate from where your normal music files are stored. This will make it easy to move, share or even purge Napster content later on. It also means you can choose to have WMP not see the Napster files if you want but not adding it to the list of folders in your WMP library. Also last time I tried it Napster's feature for putting music into multiple folders vs. one single folder didn't work, now it does seem to. If download a lot of Napster music you could end up with one huge directly which will be slow to browse if you ever visit it using a Windows explorer. So separate folder for music wither Napster putting its tracks in folders by artist and albun seems to make sense.

Some additional issues to look out for are that by default Napster names its tracks based on the artist and the track name, which may not match your Windows Media Player settings. If your WMP options tell it to rename tracks automatically to conform to its settings then you'll quickly find Napster things your files are now missing. So if you are going to play Napster tracks from within WMP then make sure that renaming option is off, or that your WMP naming scheme matchines the - scheme used by Napster.

My final tip goes to those people who are sharing a Napster music folder across a network so multiple computers don't have to download music already downloaded. Make sure when you point a Napster client at the network folder, you also tell it to import music from that folder. Otherwise it will not see the files already downloaded and insist on streaming them, and if you download the files it will add extra copies to your library wasting a lot of disk space. Note: if you have a lot of files this process will take a long time, especially over a slow network connection like WiFi.