but as for Emusic, yes the offers aren't as good as they once were, but per track the price is much better than iTunes for instance. I'd suggest you take them up on the offer of a free trial and decide based on that whether it's for you.

https://www.emusic.com/registration/1.html

First of all, they don't plug it but if you click on the napster option through your squeezebox, you get the option for a 30 day trial. The best thing about this is that you don't have to register with them at this point, so once it's finished you can sign up properly with another 30 day trial online.

Napster has transformed my use of the Squeezebox. It's great to know you can access prettty much anything you want without having the computer being switched on. I signed up for the £15 quarterly option (with a fiver off for the free trial period), and I don't think you can get a better deal for uninterupted unlimited streaming. Plus, this option gives you 15 mp3 downloads every three months.

I'm also a member of emusic, and on an old deal which is excellent. Emusic and napster are very different though. Emusic is fine for downloading (especially for the more obscure stuff), while Napster will stream anything from an alledged choice of over 8 million tracks. I haven't counted to check!

Been using Napster with my Sonos streaming system, and I've been pretty impressed so far.
The free offer and then the £15 quarterly option (as mentioned in the post above) is really as cheap as chips, especially if you remember it includes 15 downloads you can play on your ipod wherever and whenever you like. Quality is OK too - 256 kbit/s (the same as iTunes Plus tracks).
There are some artists you can't find, but I reckon around 80-90% of anything I've searched for has been available. As a test, I just tried to search for all 15 artists featured on the latest Word CD, and 12 of them came up trumps with albums and EPs available for listening. Not bad, when you wouldn't exactly class them as mainstream chart fodder...Talking of such fodder, it's a godsend when my little girl wants to listen to some JLS while she's doing her homework. I can just stream it through Napster rather than having to buy it and rip it and have it glaring at me every time I scroll down my music collection list! And then remove myself to another room and play something that doesn't bear the stench of Simon Cowell...

Most of the time, excellent. But there's a few bad 'uns. Quite a bit of stuff they aren't allowed to have. Matthew Sweet's catalogue is incomplete. Ditto The Cosmic Rough Riders. Some things are there one day and removed from your library the next.. the last Crystal Method album being one. Some things are of poor quality. Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree is horribly distorted. Some things are an unexpected bonus. The Thorns one and only album is a strange acoustic mix, and very lovely.

I continue to use Napster and, in the main, am very happy with it.

I'm lucky to have an old eMusic deal but I think the current deal is 50 tracks for 17.99 or 75 for 24.99 which is still cheap track-by-track, but if you download an album with a lot of short tracks on it it may be cheaper to go elsewhere.

The other key thing is that eMusic has a limited catalogue which tends toward independent labels so you won't find big mainstream acts on there at all. This is a plus for me as I've ended up finding loads of brilliant stuff I'd never otherwise have heard, which is generally what I use it for...taking a cheap punt on something new.

You have to remember to use up your credits each month as you can't carry them forward and I've been caught out a couple of times as it's every 30 days rather than calendar monthly.

Another trade-off is that the files are generally variable bit rate (VBR). They sound fine to me on headphones but this probably won't be good enough for some ears.

Hi all

I am considering buying a Squeezebox duet but would like to know how you search for artist using the Squeezbox controller when using napster? I see no keyboard on the controller.

but the Squeezebox Radio (which I have) doesn't have a keyboard either. The radio has a slightly labourious twist and click interface, a bit like you used to have on the high score charts of arcade games; I suspect that the duet has something similar, and possibly easier to use.

The good thing is you can save favoured albums to your own library and then cycle through them, rather than having to search for an artist each time. (and you can do this on your home computer so no need for searches on the squeezebox at all if you want).