The P2P service Qtrax has launched. A message on the download site says that ‘We’re thrilled with the massive response we’ve received. To ensure the best user experience, we’re activating accounts in stages. In the meantime, enjoy all the functionalities of the Qtrax player like importing and playing your music and searching for artist-related content.’

Upon downloading the Qtrax player, dubbed ‘Songbird’ and installing, then allowing it through our firewall, we found that it resembled very much Apple’s own music player iTunes with tabbed browsing and error pages like Firefox. Two tabs opened up the moment we launched Songbird, and, as you can see in the screenshot, both request to load music.qtrax.com. Unfortunately, the subdomain appears to be down and we are left with a music player that feels worse than the bloatware and memory hog that is iTunes.

According to Torrentfreak, Songbird uses the Gnutella P2P network that was prominent before the rise of BitTorrent. If so, what’s the legality in that?

Only time will tell. Stay tuned (sorry) for updates as we wait for these appalling server errors to be corrected and attempt to figure out what they mean by an account - KhellMirror was under the impression that it was a non-registration type of software according to their actual download page. Contradictory, to say the least.

If for some reason the Qtrax download server crashes from the strain as well, we’ve mirrored the Songbird player here.

UPDATE: Well, Songbird’s homepage finally loaded, but when we clicked to register, it promptly returned the same error page again. We’ll continue to keep you informed. You can see from the homepage though that the music tracks available aren’t…that well known.

UPDATE 2: The music.qtrax.com site is now responsive. It seems Qtrax is dead, however, due to the four music labels refusing to strike a licensing deal with Qtrax earlier today. When we attempted to digitally download Kate Nash’s Foundation track of a duration of 4:05 we got a pop-up stating ‘Downloads coming soon!’. To think, they invested $500,000 to build Qtrax. I wonder how much they’ve made from the advertising already, though?