News

Another Early P2P Site Goes Legal

Little-known Qtrax, which was an early player in the peer-to-peer music sharing game, has now been rebranded as a legal service through EMI Music. It's still a free service, actually, but it's ad-supported, and the free tunes are in a proprietary format, .mpq, that can only be played a certain number of times, and can't be downloaded to a portable device. Music can be purchased, however.

Reporting for Reuters, Chris Marlowe noted that Qtrax also offers a subscription service that delivers music in Windows Media format. Those tunes can be moved to almost any MP3 player -- except the iPod, of course -- and they will become unplayable if the user stops paying the fee.

A launch date for Qtrax's rebirth has not been announced, and no pricing has been made public yet. Screenshots of the MPQ Player software are available on the company's Web site, but it's not clear if Mac OS X will be supported by it.

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