LOS ANGELES (AP) - Nearly a year after the Napster brand was rescued from the ashes of the ruined file-swapping service, a revamped online music store bearing the familiar name debuted Thursday in limited release.

A test version of Napster 2.0 launched with more than a half-million songs from all the major music labels and with individual song and album downloads as well as a subscription service.

It will be available to the general public Oct. 29, officials said.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Roxio Inc., which owns the Napster name, shelved its former online music service, pressplay, and starting moving subscribers to Napster.

Pressplay, which went off-line Tuesday, offered access to songs only for a monthly fee.

Napster 2.0 users will see prices in line with what other services charge, which is about $1 per song and about $10 for full albums or monthly subscription.

Once a participant in Napster's illegal service, LSA junior Courtney Mays ponders the issue of why Napster was created. "I think that record companies should lower the prices of CDs," said Mays. "If CDs were $10, they would make more of a profit."

The service allows users to copy, or "burn," single songs onto CDs an unlimited number of times, but, like other services, users can't burn more than five CDs with the same playlist.

"Our company's passion for what we're doing will really be felt by consumers and I think it's also very consistent with the original vision for Napster," said Chris Gorog, Roxio's chairman and chief executive.

The music industry has seen CD sales plummet over the last three years as illegal music file-sharing exploded, beginning with the original Napster, which established a peer-to-peer network for users to swap music without paying copyright holders. That service was forced to shut down in 2001 after a protracted legal battle with recording companies.

Since then, the number of music fans who download and burn music from the Internet has decreased. "I only buy CDs from my favorite artists," Mays said. "The whole downloading thing is not a big deal anymore."

Roxio is betting the Napster brand will help set its new service apart from a bevy of other digital music retailers that have launched since April, when Apple Computer Inc. introduced its iTunes Music Store.

Also vying for a piece of the market are Buy.com's BuyMusic.com, RealNetworks' Rhapsody, MusicNow and MusicNet.

File-sharing over the most popular peer-to-peer networks has declined in recent weeks, coinciding with a lawsuit campaign against downloaders by the recording industry.

Traffic on Kazaa's network, the most popular, dropped 41 percent between the last week of June and mid-September, according to Nielsen NetRatings, which monitors Internet usage.

At the same time, online music sales are expected to grow from 1 percent of the total music market to 12 percent in 2008, generating about $1.5 billion in sales, according to Jupiter Research.

-Siabhon Sturdivant contributed to this report for the Daily.