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Virgin Digital with Red Pass

Virgin Digital with Red Pass

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cnet editors' rating 6.3/10 Good Editorial policies >>
average user rating from 9 users 4.7/10 Mediocre Read user opinions >>

Product summary

The good: Huge song library surpasses 2 million tracks; some great options for browsing music and filling your portable player; costs less per month than a new CD; software automatically updates itself; lots of humorous messages woven into the software; solid e-mail support via Ask the Expert feature.

The bad: Not all PlaysForSure portable devices work flawlessly with the to-go feature; interface lacks familiar drop-down menus; no automatic tagging of tracks à la Gracenote; limited bit rates for CD ripping; doesn't display album art for imported tracks; autoload feature suffers from slow performance; no longer the most affordable service.

The bottom line: The improved version 2 of Virgin Digital's music-subscription service is easy to use and has more than 2 million songs, but performance issues with portable devices hinder the experience. Thankfully, the company is continually deploying fixes for such bugs.

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Reviewed by: Rick Broida and James Kim

Reviewed on 1/17/06 Updated on: 6/28/06 Editor's note: We have updated this review and the score to reflect Virgin Digital's price increase from $7.99 per month to $14.99 per month.

Joining on-the-go music-subscription services such as Napster To Go, Rhapsody To Go, and Yahoo Music Unlimited, Virgin Digital's Red Pass provides all-you-can-hear access to a mammoth library of music: more than 2 million tracks, according to the company. For $14.99 per month (Virgin just drastically raised the price from an industry-best $7.99), not only can you download or stream an unlimited number of songs, but you can copy them to most Windows-driven PlaysForSure-compatible portable players; iPods don't qualify, alas. At the same time, you gain access to some nifty features, such as a one-click autoload option that can fill your player with songs from an artist, an album, or a genre. And of course, you can still purchase tracks à la carte in the Music Store. Virgin Digital delivers plenty of good stuff for music lovers, including an excellent radio feature, but the big news with the current version 2.0 is that the software is much more stable. While Virgin Digital still lacks a few key features and doesn't communicate glitch-free with portable players, the service's simple but powerful interface and selection of music make it a bona fide option for Windows-based digital music lovers.

Setup and interface of Virgin Digital with Red Pass

We had no problems downloading or installing the Virgin Digital Player; in fact, go to www.virgindigital.com, and you'll be able to instantly download or run the application. It does take a while to import your existing music collection, though you can monitor the progress in the universal-progress display window. The application automatically updates itself with any patches, and presumably, there have been many updates since our last review, which detailed its overall bugginess. According to Virgin, such patches are fetched and installed automatically, with no intervention required on the user's part. But we feel safe in saying Virgin is actively working to fix anything that's broken.

Virgin Digital's interfacing is visually appealing and fairly easy to navigate.

The Virgin Digital Player's interface resembles Napster's, with a large browserlike area in the middle, menu and drive selections in the left pane, and a now-playing queue in the right pane. However, Virgin went a bit too far in trying to simplify the interface, ridding it of conventions such as drop-down menus. As a result, users are forced to work harder to find common features that would normally be accessible from, say, the File or the Tools menu. Fortunately, it doesn't take long to get comfortable with the interface, which relies heavily on dragging and dropping, as well as right-clicking menus. Even so, we'd like to see Virgin relocate the volume and playback controls from their awkward positions at the top of the screen positions at the top of the screen (directly above the play queue would be perfect) and enlarge the tiny browser controls, which are so nondescript that you tend to forget they're there.

When viewing your music collection, you have a choice between List View, which shows all tracks, and Album View, which shows an icon for each album. Unfortunately, if you've imported music that has album art to My Collection, the icon doesn't display album art like it should; instead, all you see is a Virgin logo and the "image unavailable" message. When you rip CDs locally within Virgin Digital, however, the album art appears. What's more, you can't add columns to List View. Although it shows essential information such as track name, album, artist, and length, there's no option to add bit rate, year, or file type. We'd also like to view the latest added songs, especially if you start downloading thousands of tracks. What you can do, however, is filter the display to show personal, purchased, downloaded, and/or streamed tracks just by clicking the corresponding buttons atop the list. This is certainly a handy interface feature in that it helps distinguish between personal, subscription, and purchased music collections. There's also a dynamic search field that drills down into your collection as you type, thus making it fast and easy to find what you're after.

Features of Virgin Digital with Red Pass

Up until June 30, 2006, a Virgin Digital subscription costs an amazing $7.99 per month. After that, you'll have to pony up $14.99 per month for unlimited streaming and downloading, which takes the service beyond the premium pricing level you'll find with Napster To Go or Rhapsody To Go--talk about a good deal gone bad. Since Virgin Digital offers subscription and to-go features at one price, you'll get a better overall deal at Napster ($9.95 per month) and Rhapsody ($9.99 per month) if you don't want to use portable devices. Now Yahoo Music Unlimited, with its $6.99-per-month basic plan and $11.99 per month for the to-go option, is again the value leader for subscriptions. Virgin Digital was once considered tempting, thanks to the size of its song library--ostensibly the Web's largest, along with iTunes, at more than 2 million tracks. But now, you'll have to add its price to the problems inherent to the Virgin Digital Player.

As a music manager, Virgin Digital is functional but a bit light on features. It doesn't monitor local folders for new additions, and it can't autotag or download album art for the existing tracks in your music library. In fact, it doesn't even display album art for imported tracks that already have it. When ripping CDs, the highest available bit rate is 192Kbps, and WMA is the only encoding option; those wanting integrated MP3 encoding should try elsewhere. And don't look for visualizations or an auto-DJ; you won't find them here. The closest thing you get to an auto-DJ are artist- and genre-based mixes, though the former is too narrow and the latter too broad. Another missing feature you'll find in some other jukeboxes--Windows Media Player and iTunes, for instance--is the ability to manage and view other types of media, such as photos and video. While Virgin Digital keeps the focus on music (and it does a great job of presenting its content), the lack of extra media-management features that many digital audio players support may compel users to use Windows Media Player in concert with Virgin Digital. It's important to note that Napster, Yahoo, and other competitors focus only on music as well.

But there's endless fun to be had in the Red Pass section, where you can tap into that incredible Virgin library. Look up any album or artist, and you'll find tracks, biographies, reviews, and other typical stuff. Virgin also serves up some neat options that you won't find elsewhere, such as Join Fan Ring, which adds you to a mailing list for the artist; Share the Love, for sending album/artist links to other Virgin Digital users; and Google This Artist, an instant Google search. We also liked the One Click Away links, which provide quick access to similar artists, and the Surprise Me option, which queues up a random artist.

The real power in Virgin Digital lies in The Button, a click that enables you to play a mix of the current artist or genre, autoload the artist's entire catalog on your portable player, or autoload the album or genre. The last two options give you a quick and easy way to stuff your player with tracks you like, as well as discover ones you might like, if you choose the genre option. Other shortcuts include downloading an album to your library, creating an instant playlist from the album, and adding streams to your collection. In short, Red Pass makes it easy and enjoyable to browse, discover, and download music; we had a blast with it. Unfortunately, the fun came to a somewhat abrupt halt when we started adding portable players to the mix. See the Performance section for details. However, Virgin Digital makes it easy to manage your devices with clear information on what device is authorized and how many authorizations you have left (two devices at any one time, with one deauthorization per month).

Virgin Digital also offers the robust Radio section, with more than 60 stations in a variety of categories. The radio interface is simple and beckons to be explored, and the quality of the programming (from Made in Japan to Liquid Lounge) is top notch. Songs are streamed at 128Kbps, though you can't skip past tracks you don't like. What's more, you can't add radio tracks to your collection, as you can with Napster's service. Not every track appears in the play queue, as the radio programming includes songs not available for download or streaming on demand.

We like the humorous verbiage that permeates the Virgin software. For example, the pop-up descriptor for the Personal section of your library reads: "Music that you have ripped from CDs or acquired from other, hopefully legal, sources." And when you want to block certain system messages from appearing, you might see a checkbox labeled, "Don't show this annoying thing again." You'll also notice that the volume meter goes up to 11.

If you want to purchase a song or an album, you can do it from within Red Pass by right-clicking and selecting Buy. For instance, a handful of tracks from the Billy Joel box set My Lives couldn't be streamed or downloaded; they could be purchased only as part of the full album. Admittedly, these kinds of limitations aren't uncommon among online stores, but it can be frustrating to discover that a few desired tracks just can't be had. We do like shortcuts, such as hitting Option+Click to select and purchase specific songs from a group, as well as the ability to right-click and add tracks to a specific portable player straight from the progress window.

Performance of Virgin Digital with Red Pass

With a few exceptions, the new Virgin Digital Player worked well as a desktop music manager. Streaming audio began playing just a few seconds after we clicked a link, and downloads arrived at a healthy clip--even two tracks at a time. Navigating the site is also a breezy affair. Still, a few bugs emerged, though bugginess was much more common in past versions. Some of the current bugs that we experienced included the progress display window freezing up in the middle of downloading; following the progress of a song being transferred to a portable device, only to find out that the song wasn't the correct one; and still an inconsistency in the way songs transferred to portable devices.

We tested Virgin Digital and Red Pass with three PlaysForSure-compatible players: a Creative Zen Vision:M, a Samsung YP-Z5, and a Toshiba Gigabeat S. The players themselves always showed up on the menu and had viewable content, but our Red Pass music didn't always appear on the player itself, even though we watched the copying progress. Later, we were able to autoload tracks, but the process was slow: It took nearly 30 minutes to download and copy a 100-track playlist. Plus, we had difficulty determining when it was done because the autoload progress meter continued to show 78 percent, even after copying had stopped. And sometimes we discovered random tracks on our portable player that we'd never selected for download or even streamed to our PC. We were also a bit disappointed that the software didn't copy album art to our portable players. However, purchased tracks transferred and played without any problems.

Unlike most other subscription services, Virgin creates customized drivers for each MP3 player with the goal of optimizing the device recognition and the transfer experience for the end user. This attention to detail is wonderful in theory, but Virgin's efforts to bandage what has long been seen as a glitchy affair across all subscription services have resulted in an inconsistent experience. In our testing, subscription transfers to a Creative Zen Vision:M didn't work while similar transfers to our Samsung YP-Z5 worked fine. If you are interested only in the nonsubscription aspects of Virgin Digital, we wholeheartedly recommend it. We do recommend the Red Pass subscription service too, with the caveat that if you decide to utilize the to-go feature, make sure your player works seamlessly with the service.

Service and support of Virgin Digital with Red Pass

There's only one visible means of getting help from Virgin: the Ask the Expert button. Clicking it provides a form for you to describe your problem, which can be designated music, technical, or other. Needless to say, more categories would be helpful, and the lack of additional fields for describing your hardware and the specific nature of your problem increases the need for additional back-and-forth communication.

That said, we love Ask the Expert. After submitting a question, we quickly received an amusing reply from an automated bot, letting us know a live person would soon be in touch. Sure enough, within about 2 hours (sometimes less), we received a personalized, problem-specific reply from a Virgin tech. Even more amazing, the tech followed up with us a couple of days later. That kind of service makes us much more willing to overlook Virgin Digital's various technical issues. But we do wish the company offered more support options, such as a toll-free number for help with billing issues and an online message board for sharing help with others.