Qtrax doesn't only claim to have full support of the music industry for a free P2P music service. Another audacious claim made by Qtrax CEO Allan Klepfisz during his announcement on Sunday was that starting April 15th, users would be able to transfer Qtrax subscription tracks onto their iPods.
From This Is London:
We've heard this one before... Real claimed to have cracked the iPodwith its Harmony technology, which could turn Real DRM into AppleFairplay DRM so that Real-purchased music would be playable on iPods. Apple fought back by releasing new versions of Fairplay that disabled Real's workaround.
Klepfiszwon't say how Qtrax plans on pulling this off, but it might havesomething to do with iTunes Movie Rental DRM, which includes an expiration aspect (a necessary component of the Qtrax model).
The thing is, there's already a feature in Qtrax for dealing with Apple's Fairplay DRM, and already it doesn't work.
A Quicktime Playback extension, originally developed for the Songbird engine that forms the foundation of Qtrax, says it "allows you to play Fairplay Audio files in Songbird." When I tried to play multiple songs that hadbeen purchased from the iTunes music store, none of them wouldplay. The play progress meter advanced, but all I heard was the soundof silence.
Qtrax says it can put tracks from a P2P network onto an iPod withoutupsetting any of the major labels starting on April 15th. The companyis hardly in a position to ask for our trust about that or anythingelse, so maybe they should aim their sights a bit lower: like, gettingtheir existing Fairplay playback feature to work (or dropping it from thedefault installation).
