Well I bit the bullet a couple of weeks ago and subscribed to Virgin Digital‘s unlimited streaming and download service for £14.99/month, which includes being able to transfer to Elizabeth’s Zen Micro.
In case you’ve wisely forgotten my previous rant, this is essentially music rental; if I stop paying the subs, any music I download stops playing at the end of the month. The poor quality I previously bemoaned on Napster was, it seems, not down to the encoding method, but down to Napster’s retrograde encoder, since Virgin use the exact same format and their’s actually does sound better. Who would have guessed their advertising was actually true?
They have, however, shown varying levels of competence on other fronts. When I first signed up they actually managed to bill me twice according to their own records, and three times according to Barclaycard, but they have now refunded the extra two charges. Amusingly, my Virgin account history now claims I’ve never paid them a penny, yet they let me use the service anyway, since I have actually paid.
Also, when I first installed their software, downloading just didn’t work at all – tracks in the download queue would just get stuck and never finish. I emailed the tech support, but after a few hours got bored of waiting and researched the problem myself, and had it fixed in about 30mins. Out of curiosity I let them believe it still wasn’t working to see how long it would take them to reach the solution I had reached.
The answer: 9 days.
In all fairness, they did respond with the exact fix (which was pretty obscure) on their second email to me, but taking 9 days to do so would have pissed me off if I had actually been unable to use the service all that time.
Apart from that, the software is pretty good; definitely more polished and easier to use than the Napster client, and with far fewer bugs. Music selection is about the same as far as I can tell. All said, I’m pretty happy with it, and with Elizabeth using it to fill her Zen Micro up with music too, I think I’ll stick with it for now at least.
