e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[Tinroad]

Napster links to portable MP3 players
By Agam Shah
IDG News Service, San Francisco Bureau
30-01-2004

Roxio Inc. on Wednesday updated its Napster LLC online music service by increasing the number of portable audio players onto which users can directly drag-and-drop tracks from the Napster application, the company said.

The drag-and-drop feature, which only supported Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s YP-910GS portable audio player, now supports 60 portable audio players, including Creative Labs Inc.'s NOMAD Zen line, the Dell Inc. Digital Jukebox and Rio Audio Inc.'s Cali and Nitrus, according to the company. (The list also includes the Gateway players - TR)

After plugging in the portable audio player to a computer's USB (Universal Serial Bus) port, the Napster software will recognize the portable audio player and add the device as a library, allowing users to drag and drop audio files from the main interface into the portable audio player library, according to a company spokeswoman.

Linking to a wider number of audio players will increase the portability of music downloaded from Napster's online music service, she said. Napster's online music service currently offers 500,000 songs encoded in WMA (Windows Media Audio) format.

Napster also updated pricing for its Premium service, allowing members to reduce the cost-per-track by purchasing songs in bulk, the company said in a statement. Members can now buy packs of 15, 25 or 50 tracks for US$13.95, $21.95 and $39.95, respectively. Napster's basic service allows users to download music for $0.99 cents per track or $9.95 per album. Once downloaded, the music can be burned to a CD, the spokeswoman said.

A complete list of devices compatible with Napster is available at: http://windowsmedia.com/9series/Personalization/CoolDevices.asp#musicfriendly