New York (NY) – It’s not often that we put “sucks bad” in a title, but the beta Qtrax music player truly disappoints. After all the hype of allowing millions of freely playable songs, the so called “Songbird” beta program is excruciating slow, crashes often and doesn’t even offer any music.

Slideshow : Qtrax music player sucks bad

Qtrax had promised a working beta last night, but we knew there was going to be problems after visiting the website. The company warned that downloads weren’t yet available and posted this message on the site.

“We’re thrilled with the massive response we’ve received. To ensure the best user experience, we’re activating accounts in stages. In the meantime, enjoy all the functionalities of the Qtrax player like importing and playing your music and searching for artist-related content.”

Disregarding the warning, we downloaded the 9.4 megabyte install program anyways. After the install, the program scans your hard drive for music and appeared to crash several times during the process. We had to continually close and restart the program to get Songbird working again.

We then tried downloading a few music clips and at first everything appears to be ok. You are presented a description of the CD and songs. You are even given a nice shiny download button, but a pop-up box saying “Downloads Coming Soon” appears when you click the button.

But don’t be completely disappointed folks, at least Qtrax got the ads to work correctly. Take a look at our screenshot gallery and you’ll see some giant Samsung banner ads appearing along the top and side of the Qtrax player.