Qtrax is due to become available at some point today, so I've not had a chance to test it out yet.

From what I've read, it combines centralised servers for seeding with P2P sharing once files have been downloaded from them to release the burden on their bandwidth.

As a retaliation to piracy and a workable model for music distribution, this seems to be the way forward, but only time will tell how good it really is.

Yes - it is comfortable up here on the fence. I recommend you climb up and sit with me for a while.

Might as well, site is timing out and there seems no way to sign up (you can enter your info but submit button doesn't exist)

Oooooh, It's based on Mozilla too, can't be bad!!

I'll give it a shot.

Site is down temporarily due to too many people wanting free music. I wonder if they didn't think they were going to get this many hits.

Way to go foresight!

No place to be but the fence for now. I'll give it a try, but for now I'll just snuggle up here with you Pock.

Nice and cosy.

Aw, Mac users don't get the love until March 18th. :(

Can I snuggle up with you as well haven and pock?

Me too!!!

Course you can. This is getting to be quite a good group snuggle.

No date at all given for the Linux version, although they do say it's coming. I should be able to run it under WINE before then, but have to wait until tomorrow to play though

Yay! Snuggle Fence Party!

Is Q-Trax an early April fools joke?

Being a sceptic, it appears that big brother is running an on-line census of the global P2P file sharing community.

It works this way:
1. Widely advertise a "too good to be true" senario. (mention an open source interface)
2. Create a professional looking website.
3. Publish the release date of the Beta P2P client.
4. Sit back and watch the fun!

Besides generating heaps of advertising revenue for the webhost (payments based on volume of traffic to a specific site)log file should give the record companies some hard data on a problem they say is robbing them of billions.

I wonder how much they would pay for that info?

Interesting theory. I've read in various places that there have been 61,000 unique hits per hour since it was supposed to have launched, which would rather mean that if this is the case the success of the venture will be it's failure.

Any attempt to bring about any kind of action against visitors to the site would need them to demonstrate that they are making efforts to do the same to everyone who went.

If they take their time to look, then as most domestic users will be on a dynamic IP, by they time they get round to going through their list of IP address sufficient numbers will have changed to make their catalogue worthless.

Plus, having seen how quickly previous attempts have been discredited, given that places like zeropaid are still saying that it is legit but flawed suggest that it isn't a scam.

And I'd like to believe that eventually the record companies will catch up to where the world is and the that it's never going to go back to how they want it to be again.