HD Tracks
HD Tracks – great catalogue, lousy download manager. www.hdtracks.com
I have been following HD tracks for couple of years now. There is no doubt that this is the future of digital music – studio grade master recordings in glorious 24 bit, and now there are lots of really good albums available, including new releases. The prices – $18 to $20 for single albums – are a little high for my liking. However, every once in a while I receive an promotional email with a discount voucher (10% off). As I have usually been saving up albums that I want to buy for some time, often the discount code prompts me to purchase them all. Two things result: 1. I always hit purchase and then seconds later realize that there was an album that I forgot. When I go to order that album, I am told that I have already used the discount code and cannot use it again. THIS IS BAD BUSINESS. Not only should they let me use my discount code again, they should give me an additional discount of 5% for spending over $100 to tempt me to download even more music (that I already own in at least 2 other formats – CD and Vinyl). Instead, I give up and they lose money. The other issue 2. Once you go to download, usually half way thru, the download manager crashes, and after closing it an reopening it, often the download starts from the beginning (this can be a 10 or 15 GB download) and crashes at the same spot. Just last week after 2 days of annoying starts and stops, deleting the .part file etc. it just downloaded the rest. Bizarre. The DL manager sucks. They should check out the one on the Bowers and Wilkins music club site – much better. The other thing that bugs me is that there is no re-download facility (that is the reason I gave up on emusic.com): my hard drive died very soon after a previous download, and took my precious 24 bit files with it. As far as HDTracks are concerned – tough luck, if you want the tracks – pay for them again. This is ludicrous, I have no objection to a nominal fee for their bandwidth costs, but I have paid for the tracks – to license them for my own use and I should be able to re-download them. That is very much the way cloud computing is going.
So, here are my suggestions for HD Tracks: 1. Form a music club, charge audiophiles (who tend to be spendthrift) an annual subscription fee (for example $100) and knock 25% off all downloads for us all the time. 2. Get a new download manager. 3. Let us re-download our files at least once. 4. Open up a European store
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