puretracks
Puretracks is a Canadian
wannabe music download site. The only reason I found myself
browsing the site was because someone at work handed me a coupon
for a free song He had won in a bag of chips.
First of course you need to register an account, they don't ask for
much information, name, email, age, gender, birth year and postal
code. The latter being the one I object to the most, I just don't
like giving my postal code out to websites for some reason, even
though its probably totally harmless. In such cases I use M6K-3E3
which is the postal code of the
Canadian Recording Industry Association,
I also use the CRIA phone number and street address if a website
requires them unnecessarily.
Anyway, back to puretracks, when I redeemed my coupon, I couldn't
download the music because it required an Active X control. Then I
noticed a link for alternative download methods, clicked that and
firefox's save file dialog opened up asking me what I would like to
do with "downloadmanager.exe", which of course I wanted nothing to
do with. Finally a link was found to the file itself, and it turned
out its in Windows Microsoft ASF format and mplayer wont even play
it. So this is where I whine about the website being unfair because
it only supports 90% of computer users.... Even though I suppose
there is no incentive to support users on non windows platforms, it
would be upsetting to me as a company CEO if anyone were to be
turned away from my product because of browser/platform
incompatibility.
One other thing I noticed, songs are $0.99 each, but if a song on
an album is longer than 6 mins, they are $1.98 ! nice eh?
Overall not a very good first impression.