Qtrax Free Music Download Service Offers Free, Unlimited Music Downloads (With A Catch)

Free legal music downloads. It’s the holy grail for both pirates looking to go legit and misers. Finally it seems to have arrived in the form of QTrax, a silverlight-based free music download service that – perhaps most surprising of all – is available to Australians. There is a pretty big catch though…

That catch is that the song files are only available as DRM-laden WMA files. Ouch.

Because of the DRM restrictions, the music can only be played back on your computer, although because it’s silverlight based, it works on both PCs and Macs. There are no official numbers as to how much music is available through the Qtrax store, but Gus over at Lifehacker managed to find a few issues like missing songs from albums and ‘buy now’ options sending users to the Amazon music store, a useless option for Australians.

But despite all that, it’s a free service that offers a heap of music legally and free to Australians. With the country’s history of dragging their feet at every opportunity for legal consumption of media, Qtrax is an interesting proposition that could potentially be great.

Now the question is: Will you use it?

[QTrax via Lifehacker]