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Puretracks.com Enters The Online Music Fray

Posted by timothy on from the enjoy-the-long-canadian-winter dept.

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.

2 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Canadian CD tax by tessaiga · · Score: 3, Informative
    Why would Canadians need an online music service when Canadians are legally allowed to make copies for personal use? The whole point of the 21-cent CD tax (PDF) over there is to explicitly allow this sort of thing. After all, Canadians are already paying an ever-increasing amount for this very privilage.

    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 ...
  2. OS Limitations by elliotj · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    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 .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.

    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?