Slashdot Mirror
Puretracks.com Enters The Online Music Fray
Greedo writes "Two articles, one from the CBC and one from The Globe and mail report that puretracks.com has launched, offering 99-cent (Canadian dollars) downloads for music tracks. As a Canadian who wishes Apple would get their iTunes Music Store available to non-US customers, this may be the alternative I've been waiting for. Although I think they only offer .WMV files (boo)."
Check out
mgoyer's " rough review" of the service.
Since there's almost no way that server will hold up:
Puretracks, Canada's first online music store launched today. Thoughts:
Tracks: $0.99CDN
Albums: $9.99CDN
Approx 175,000 tracks. Supposed to double in size in a month.
Question: How much does the artist get?
Pages do not render properly in Mozilla
Has a wishlist - That's a good idea
Server intermittenly crashes (they're using Microsoft) (hello load testing). I know Apple's iTunes Music Store also had issues the first day but this being a Canadian site I'd expect their traffic to be several magnitudes less.
Has some exclusive tracks
Burning: 'You can burn your music downloads to CD 3 times.'
Portable players: 'You can transfer your music downloads an unlimited number of times to 3 separate portable devices'
Portability: You cannot take songs to work or transfer between notebook and desktop machines at home. 'This license will only be active on the computer to which the song is downloaded. For this reason, it is important that you purchase and download your music using your primary computer. Once you have downloaded a song, you will be able to listen, burn, or transfer from only that computer. '
Uses WMA format: 192kbps
Works only with Windows machines
Can only listen to (some) tracks on devices which support Windows Media. Does not work with iPods the most popular portable music device
No indicator of how long the preview is
They charge GST+PST
First time users get a free track with their first purchase
You have to download and install a Moontaxi Media plugin to download your purchases
You can download and pay for just one track.
My order number was 4231. Did they reset order numbers after beta testing?
Confirmation email:
We strongly recommend that your burn your new tracks to a back-up CD for safe keeping, in the event that you experience PC failure in the future. Please see help for details. Blank RW CD discs can be purchased at any computer store
Note that there is a levy on blank CDs so you're paying for your music twice if you backup onto CDs.
Shows downloads progress but not the speed/rate of transfer. Feels slow.
After downloading and pressing listen in the download manager I got an error saying that I did not have the license for the song. So I click on the help link and it gives me a HTTP 403 - Forbidden error.. Hmmm. But when I launch it from WMP it works fine.
Can non-Canadian people pay and download the songs?
Conclusion: I will not use this service since it does not support my iPod.
Coverage elsewhere:
Fluff Globe article: Canadian firm launchs digital music service
6:11:50 PM [10 comments]
Today's Globe and Mail:
Students anxious about job market:
Half of the university students polled and four in 10 college students say they anticipate having trouble finding a job.
Yes we are anticipating having trouble finding a job. It doesn't help that everyone is also moving development offshore: IT jobs contracted from far and wide
Editorial by Brain Robertson the head of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, Don't torch musicians' incomes, burn media piracy:
Canada's music industry has been the hardest hit of any country in the world by illegal file sharing. Retail sales are down by more than $425-million since 1999. In the last year, staff layoffs at record companies have topped 20 per cent. (About 45,000 people are dependent, directly or indirectly, on the recording industry in Canada.) If this decline continues, there will be less money to invest in Canadian artists and Canadian music.
Remember who Brain Robertson represents; record labels. As a result he does not care about the musicians; he is more concerned about staff layoffs. His article also fails to mention the vast sum of money collected by the CPCC in the form of a levy/tarrif that has largely gone un-distributed.
I wrote them a nice note, complimenting them on the site design, navigation, organization, etc; I was even encouraging about the selection, saying that while they didn't have everything, they had more than enough to encourage at least $100 a year out of me.
Then I said, "but of course, since you only support Windows and I have a Linux box and an MP3-only portable player, I won't be giving you any business at all"...and how sorry I was about that.
Best I could do....
Granted, this currently only applies to sneakernet and the application of this argument to peer-to-peer networks has yet to be tested in court. This is IMHO a very important point that needs to be clarified in Canadian law for the good of the public. Otherwise, everyone there runs the risk of having to double-pay for every song they get online -- once to download the song, and once again to burn it onto CD.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
Kinda reminds me of the Ontario Electricity Market Operator www.theimo.com. During the post-blackout period, they posted the current Ontario demand hourly. It was useful to check their site to determine if rolling blackouts were required. One problem: they ship you a 100KB background bitmap which for some reason wasn't cached by MSIE. During peak use, the server failed to keep up with the load. I wonder what they could have done had they simply dropped the bitmap for that week...
Having said that, I'd argue that it's unfair and legally sketchy for a Canadian online company to restrict your ability to use your online music purchases. Puretracks.com makes a big deal out of being Canada-only at the moment, which means that they should be more tuned in to Canadian copyright regulation. The thing is, because of CD taxation, Canadians are allowed to make as many copies as they want for personal use. Restricting the number of copies you can make via DRM prevents you from exercising that right. Note that this is completely separate from the question of whether the personal-use argument applies to P2P networks -- with Puretracks, you've already paid to get the songs digitally.
It'd be interesting to see if anyone challenges their DRM restrictions legally based on these arguments. I'd suspect it's something they'll inevitably see this issue raised sooner or later ... Canadians haven't been too happy about the CD tax in general (especially when they see Americans getting blank CDs for free or almost free after rebate); at least before they were getting something in return for the extra price. If precendents like this continue to be set, the CD tax is just going to be free music industry money without returning any value to the consumer.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
Ok, I tried buying a song from my tiBook, mainly because I wanted to see if I could convert from WMA to MP3 and put it on my iPod. As a Canadian Apple user I'm a little pissed at ITMS for not being available here.
.aspx page. I expect the payment part uses some active-x control that will limit you to those OSs or x86/Linux running IE in Wine. I assume they do OS detection from the browser ID.
When I tried to create an account and proceed to enter my credit card info, I got the following message:
Sorry, Puretracks only supports the following OS's: Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / 2003 / XP and IE 5+
It was on an
Bummer.
What's up with people making new web services in this fashion? I mean, how much harder is it to select technology that will work on all platforms and do your development from there?
Well not to quibble but the audiophiles think CD's are of moderate quality. One of the reasons the apple iTunes sounds better is they arent ripped from CD's but rather higher quality sourced from the music studios like DAT etc. Better input generaly means better output or the ability to have better output. BTW there are good walkman headphones they cost about 300 bucks though.
:)
Yes I'm a somewhat audiophile DVD-Audio sounds like a decent source to rip from to bad there is so little content avalible on it.
You may be an audiophile if your current sterio amp cost more than your first car
No sir I dont like it.