More problems with HDtracks!

Posted by: Hot Rats on 24 March 2011

I purchased the 24-96 download of 'Tommy' from HDtracks. After an awful lot of grief with their Java based downloader and a couple of complaining emails to HDtracks, I finally managed to get the album downloaded. It sounded very good apart from the last track that was cut short of its full length.

Today I receive the following email:

Dear HDTracks Customer;

You spoke up, and HDTracks listened! We genuinely appreciate the passionate interest in music our customers share with HDTracks.com. When we offer titles from our label partners, and our customers comment, we take their comments seriously and do everything we can to address any concerns. We stand behind our customers.

As an online retailer, we're not always in a position to dictate what our content provider decides to package and sell as an album through HDTracks.com, nor can we ever be as knowledgeable as a company as our customers are individually when it comes to album release content. When a customer has a concern about an album release, we listen, and we go back to our content providers to find out how we can make our customers happy.

We're not satisfied until the customer is satisfied. As a result of your valuable feedback, we are pleased to announce that your concerns about the length/version of the 24th track from The Who's Tommy have been addressed with the label and as of today, you are now able to replace the track you originally purchased with the longer version so many of you requested.

TO RECEIVE YOUR CORRECTED COPY OF THE FINAL TRACK ON "TOMMY":

1. Please DELETE the copy of "We're Not Gonna Take It.flac" that is on your computer.
2. Log into HDtracks and add Tommy (the full album) to your shopping cart: (Link edited) Proceed to checkout.
4. Enter the following code in the Promo code box: EDITED
5. Click the "apply promo code" button.
6. Confirm that your order total is $0.00 and then click Continue.

At this point, the download manager will start downloading the album Tommy, but it will skip all the tracks that are already on your computer and only download the final track, "We're Not Gonna Take It". If for any reason you have a problem downloading this track, or if you find that the track's timing has not updated, please contact us as soon as possible.

Please note that this code will expire on March 28th, so please download your new copy of "We're Not Gonna Take It" before then!

Thank you for your continued support as we build the world's biggest high-definition audio music store on the Internet.

Please let us know if there anything else we can do for you to satisfy you with your purchase.

 

Does it do what HDtracks said it would? Does it hell! The downloader downloads the pdf file containing artwork, which it shouldn't do and then attempts to download the first track 'Overture', which it also shouldn't do. It fails to download. All other tracks have a 'Waiting on server' message.

It would appear that HDtracks are quite unable to offer a quality service to their customers.They will surely not stay in business for too long with this track record and their potential customers will resort to illegal download sites to acquire the albums that they offer. When this happens the artists will not be paid for their work so HDtracks are doing not only a disservice to their customers, they are also serving artists poorly.

I will certainly not be purchasing any more downloads from them!

Posted on: 25 March 2011 by jfritzen
I received the same e-mail, due to the short last track of the Tommy album. The re-download for that track was a bit clumsy and very slow ("Waiting on server") so I tried it again some hours later and then all went well. I simply renamed the old folder and re-downloaded the entire album. But I agree, their download agent could be a bit more elaborate.

But I can only say that the people at hdtracks.com were very helpful. They even offered me a free album when I reported the short track to them. And they still have the widest range of hi-res labels, so I will certainly keep buying from them.
Posted on: 26 March 2011 by Hoekie

I received the same email, for me it worked well, just make sure the album tracks are in the folder where you will download it again, otherwise it will download the full album again, in stead of just track 24.

Posted on: 26 March 2011 by GerryMcg
Originally Posted by jfritzen:
But I can only say that the people at hdtracks.com were very helpful. They even offered me a free album when I reported the short track to them. And they still have the widest range of hi-res labels, so I will certainly keep buying from them.

As will I. I did a full download as I find it quicker to download to my Laptop drive and then move it to my NAS. Took an hour to do the full download, a bit quicker than last time.

Posted on: 26 March 2011 by Hot Rats

Hoekie ... Thanks. I have made sure that they tracks are in the same place on my hard drive as they were for the original download. Now the HDtracks downloader is ommitting all the other tracks as it should but it still refuses to download the final track.

 

jfritzen ... I am yet to hear from HDtracks. I wouldn't call that particularly helpful! At the end of the day the HDtracks Java based downloader is a pile of crap. They should develop an laternative as quickly as they can. I certainly won't buy any more from HDtracks until they do!

Posted on: 26 March 2011 by Hoekie

Hot Rats, forgot to mention it did not download the final track right away, but I left the java downloader running, had to do some shopping, when I came home the track was downloaded. Maybe try it again at let it run for an hour or so.

Altogether, they do sell good highres quality, hard to find anywhere else on the web.

Posted on: 26 March 2011 by jfritzen
Originally Posted by Hot Rats:

I have made sure that they tracks are in the same place on my hard drive as they were for the original download. Now the HDtracks downloader is ommitting all the other tracks as it should but it still refuses to download the final track.

My impression is that the download manager is not very smart (nor talkative) and probably it does not recognize your old titles. I had tagged mine and the download of track 24 wouldn't start. Could have been the new tags, different checksums of the files, overloaded servers or something totally different. 

 

Before you give up better try to download the entire album: Stop the download manager, rename the old directory and start the download manager again. You will see if it starts downloading the PDF and the first tracks and if so the rest will download too. Takes a little more time but worked for me. From my experience, as long as the download manager did not notify to you that the entire download has completed, you can always break off and start over with the download.

Posted on: 28 March 2011 by Hot Rats

I couldn't get it to download the final track only so I let it grab the whole album again. Something of a pain but I left it overnight and it was done the next morning. Still no reply from HDtracks though.