We've been big proponents of the all-you-can download subscription plans being used by services like Napster, Rhapsody, and others. The latest, MTV's new Urge service, launches into public beta on Wednesday, and may give existing services a run for their subscription fee.

Urge's main selling point is its integration with Windows Media Player 11, which also launches into public beta on Wednesday. It uses WMP 11's navigation, cribs some UI cues, and lets WMP 11 users purchase and download music without even opening a new window. The relationship very much resembles iTunes Music Store's integration with iTunes 6, minus the large collection of video downloads and podcasts that iTunes offers.

Urge's price is comparable to the other subscription services. $9.95 a month will get you unlimited downloading privileges, while $14.95 a month gets you a To Go subscription for loading music onto your portable device. Urge is also offering a two-week trial without requiring any commitment or credit card number.

Judging strictly by the feature set, Urge isn't much different than Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Unlimited or any of the other subscription services. It has celebrity playlists, a bunch of streaming radio stations, artist profiles, and a growing number of blogs. You can download Billboard charts by genre and year, watch select music videos, and explore music by genre. But Urge has some cool tricks up its sleeve, too.

Near-seamless integration with Windows Media Player 11 (also in beta) means you can use WMP 11's snazzy search function with Urge, too. Type an artist, track, or name into the search field, and you'll get results back from both the Urge catalog and from your own library. And when you queue up songs to listen to or download, Urge lets you know if you already have the track in your collection—whether you ripped it, downloaded it legally, or scored it off a P2P network.

Urge also makes it easy to drill down into genres and sub-genres of music. Each category of music has its own page that includes essential artists and albums, blogs (called "Informers"), and playlists. For instance, the page for Electronic/Dance includes a playlist called "This Week in Electronic/Dance" with new releases, and another called "The Electronic 101," a 98-track primer in electronic music. You can download the whole 98-tracks worth with the click of a button, or drag and drop select tracks into your own playlist.

It's not the perfect service, though. Yahoo! Music Unlimited has a much bigger and more accessible catalog of music videos; Rhapsody and Napster seem to have better community features (though it's admittedly hard to tell until Urge gets a bigger community); iTunes has an unrivaled (and largely unchallenged) collection of TV shows, video downloads, and podcasts; and Urge's page loading and response was slower than chilled molasses (hopefully this will be fixed before the real release).

Based on our first impression, though, this could end up being the subscription service to beat once they work out some of the bugs. Urge comes bundled with the beta version of Windows Media Player 11, so to try it out for yourself, download the new player at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia/player/11 (the link will be live on Wednesday, May 17th).