So Close – Qtrax

It sounded too good to be true but I, like a lot of other people, were prepared to suspend disbelief in the hope that the industry had come around to the idea of sharing music (or that we had come even closer to the ‘Music Like Water’ Utopia that Gerd Leonnhard the Music Futurist described back in 2004).

But Qtrax has fallen just a tad short of its promised 25 million tracks at launch.

Qtrax busted out its software in “beta” last evening, but isn’t offering a single song – or even a working music browser for that matter.

The application is a barely skinned version of the open source Mozilla-based Songbird music player, which has certainly come a long ways since its infancy, and which means Qtrax has done just about nothing of note yet really; other than make promises about label deals.

When you launch the application it helpfully points you to a placeholder page from an Oracle application server, and that’s all you’ll be getting until Qtrax manages to get label deals sorted, which, sadly and disappointingly, isn’t looking that likely at this point.

Read – Qtrax
Read – Music labels say no deal