New Hi-Fi Music Store Shows Promise

THE CLIENT

I am going to preface this portion of the review by saying we should all remember that this is version 1.0 of the MusicGiants software, so we cannot expect the world.

That said, while the client shows promise, there is a quite a bit of work that still needs to be done. However, most of the problems are not serious enough to deter usage - they're just minor inconveniences.

Starting out with the front page, the client looks fairly straightforward: navigational buttons to the left, an informational pane in the middle and tabs for your 'Now Playing,' 'Download', and 'Make CD' functions of the software on the right.

The two buttons nearest to the top allow you to browse the MusicGiants catalog by genre and by artist (Note: MusicGiants will automatically connect to your Windows Media Library and will add your own collection into this list. You can also opt to have it only show your collection as well). For those planning to use the service, I'd suggest using 'Browse By Artist.' It appears as if MusicGiants hasn't completely categorized the entire catalog yet, and doing so will give you a much broader selection.

One thing I did not like was no way to view just your library ungrouped. This makes it more difficult in my opinion to build a playlist. You have to go into an artist, then their album, drag the song over, go back out, and repeat. That's a bit time consuming.

Playing songs is a pretty straightforward process. What I found nice was MusicGiants' little "fidelity meter" on the lower left hand corner. This gives you a real-time idea of what bitrate the song was encoded in. According to this scale, 0 to 160 kbps is considered low fidelity, 160-470 kbps mid-fidelity, and 470-1100 kbps high fidelity - the bitrate of Windows Media Lossless tracks.

The software will also let you rip a CD into your library, but I ran into problems here when trying to only copy over certain songs. While it created the folders to place the files in my music folder, MusicGiants did not actually rip the tracks for some reason. I chalked it up to a bug in the coding.

Also available are options to play a CD, which worked fine, and to burn a CD. The CD burning application is nice, as it gives you a graphical representation of the capacity of the CD as you drag tracks into the 'make CD' playlist. The burn application seems fast; of course the speed you burn will be dependent upon your CD-R drive.

If MusicGiants fixes the problems I've listed above, and fixes some of the user interface quirks to make the client more user friendly, the service could very well become one of the best Windows Media music stores out there.

So, does MusicGiants sing a joyful tune, or fall on deaf ears?

OUR TAKE

The Good: Did I say sound quality? MusicGiants tracks are fully worth the $1.29 you pay for them. Of course, if you have an iPod you won't be able to take them mobile unless you burn them to CD and then re-rip. But even then you'll still get better sound quality than anything from iTunes if you choose to rip them back as Apple Lossless tracks.

The Bad: The client needs work. The UI is not very user friendly, and there are a few nasty little bugs that make using MusicGiants frustrating at times. Also, no option to view your entire library at once is slightly annoying. The $50 annual fee is also strange considering you don't pay it the first year, plus the tracks are already 30 cents more than most competing services.

The Bottom Line: While some may scoff at the $50 annual fee for MusicGiants membership, if you do a lot of legal downloading this is the service for you. Also, if you’re an audiophile, and have been holding off on that MP3 player, get a higher-capacity player and sign up for this service. There are issues with the client, but I'm sure as time goes on these will be fixed. Until another service comes out with something similar MusicGiants is in a class all by itself.