First the positives. The killer app at Launch.com is the ability to create your own radio station through the selection of the types of music you want to hear and an on-the-fly rating technology within the player interface as you listen to music. Start by picking what genres of music you want to hear on your station. There is a wide variety to pick from, ranging from Celtic to ska to original cast recordings of show tunes. If you have an infinite amount of time, you can rate, on a 1-100 scale, the most popular artists and songs based on other registered Launch users. Further, if you go digging a bit, you can rate individual albums within each genre, but this was not a page I could get to with any regularity. A balky user experience is one of several significant flaws at Launch.com. To further influence what is played on your radio station, you can "subscribe" to other users' stations and their rating of songs and bands is factored into your own station's play list algorithm.

To foster community and the perceived democracy of it all, Launch posts featured DJs, who are average Joes like you and me, and lets users who have rated a minimum of 100 songs or albums post online reviews of records and concerts and band bios. As you might imagine, the reviews are less E-pinions and more Love-In. But the point is to listen to music and the Launch player, a vertical skin that takes up about 25% of the browser screen, employs the superior Windows Media technology for sound and vision, instantly placing Launch ahead of those sites shackled by Real Audio. However, this means that the Mac users among us can't experience Launch at all. From the Help FAQ, there is no near-term solution for this. Additionally, you will need Flash 4.0 installed before you hear anything.

Within the skin, you can rate the band, song and album (though about 90% of the albums are greatest hits collections and not the original pieces of vinyl) on a 1-100 scale. You can also skip a song that's playing or delete it entirely from future play lists with one click. A small icon of the album cover is in the lower left that is a hyperlink to a review of that record by someone within the Launch community, with further links to band bios, interviews and videos where available. "To Buy" links go to the Wherehouse online.

Also in the Launch player are the nicknames of people who are "fans" of the song, i.e. they have rated it 90 or higher, along with any DJs you have subscribed to who also have rated the song. All these listing are hyperlinks taking you to their personal profile pages with a click-box opportunity to subscribe to their stations as well. For fans or DJs who are online with you simultaneously, you can also send them a "whisper," in Launch parlance, or an online greeting.

A relatively new feature is the ability to do the follow the same procedure and establish a TV station with videos, though the rating you are doing is for the songs, not the videos. This is certainly an admirable decision, but one that is not clear at all unless you read the fine print in the FAQ, and don't most people think of whether a video is cool or not by how it looks, regardless of the music? A press release proudly trumpets that Melanie C's video (aka, Sporty Spice) debuted in the US on Launch. Any questions?

So, while I'm ranting, on with the bad. As mentioned, Launch is basically unavailable to Mac users and, furthermore, it regularly causes Netscape Navigator to crash. Launch's solution? Use Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Sorry, that's lame, especially with the Beta version of Navigator 6.0 getting some rave reviews. Also, as previously mentioned, navigation on the site is far from intuitive and I've spent a fair amount of time in the past few weeks at Launch. I seemed to be going around in circles, virtually speaking, in my attempts to review enough music to qualify as a "DJ" and not merely a "listener." No such luck. Delayed gratification goes for merely listening to music as well. Since I'm registered on the site and, via cookies, Launch.com recognized me every time I arrived, it still took two or three clicks (again, not the easiest interface) to launch the player to start listening to my station. Since the player is web-enabled only, it should launch when I go to Launch.

Beyond that, forget the Launch player if you're not on a dedicated connection like DSL or a T-1. At home, on my 56K modem, rarely did a song play in its entirety with out the connection falling out. Even though you can change the speed of your connection to Launch from your profile at the website, that made no difference whatsoever. Launch helpfully explains that attempting multiple online tasks via dial-up can cause stress on the connection. Thank you very much, but other players do not lose frequency as frequently. Until the entire country has DSL, provisions must be made for dial-up users. Do I even need to mention the impossibility of viewing videos from home?