Anyone had GOOD success with it? We sure haven't and I, for one, think that if it's one of the "best" ways to LEGALLY obtain music over the internet, I'm going back to Kazaa....
Backstory: My wife's father died last Wednesday. So, we figured it would be nice to put together a CD of all his favorite songs and artists -- 99.9% of which weren't in OUR collections. We thought, "gee, we could do this the right way...let's sign up for a trial membership of Pressplay." Now, we know what they mean by "Free Trial." You get to suffer for nothing.
Before anything else, we had to download their proprietary front-end client. Glad I didn't decide to do this on the linux box... The first thing I noticed was they didn't have a lot of stuff *I* would want. (No NEVERMORE!!! BAH!!!) The next thing I noticed was that even if you downloaded it, that doesn't mean you can BURN it to CD. I was OK with that, to a point. Here's where we get into the things I wasn't OK with:
- in order to burn a CD from what you've downloaded you have to BUY the number of tracks you want (or need) to burn. We decided 40 tracks would be good, so that was around $37 or so... That's more than most CDs, new. Kind of expensive, if you ask me.
- in order to actually burn a disc, you need to download and install Roxio's proprietary burn engine. Ugh. I'll live. I vastly prefer to use NERO, but since all the tracks are encoded WMA files, you really have no choice.
- did I mention the WMAs are encoded so you can't burn them with any other software? Grrr. I like having a CHOICE, especially when the proprietary software is buggier than a farmer's market in July.
- Roxio's burning software is not ready for prime time. I found out, after having it crash in the middle of "buffering" the music that there's actually a known bug in the software whereby you can't burn more than 17 tracks at a time. This "feature" is not documented anywhere on Pressplay or Roxio's web site as of yesterday.
- when this software crashes and you've purchased download credits -- these credits go bye-bye. You get two burns per CD download credit. If I hadn't called customer service, I wouldn't have known about the bug in the software and I wouldn't have gotten the credits credited BACK IF you didn't call, you could be out serious $$$ quickly. That's crap.
- The CD burning software has limits...you can overcome these limits if you pony up for the pricey version. What are these limits? 74m CDs and only being able to record at 4x....
Anyway, if anyone out there has had positive experiences with this, I'm happy for you. As for me, Pressplay can rot. As soon as I burn the rest of the stuff we "bought," I will be uninstalling the client and waxing all the proprietarily encoded WMA files.
Has anyone found a GOOD pay-for-play/burn company out there? It really is a shame that doing the right thing is such a pain in the ass. If we had used Kazaa, it'd have been done days ago and I wouldn't be posting this. Again, what's the reward for trying to do the right thing?
Backstory: My wife's father died last Wednesday. So, we figured it would be nice to put together a CD of all his favorite songs and artists -- 99.9% of which weren't in OUR collections. We thought, "gee, we could do this the right way...let's sign up for a trial membership of Pressplay." Now, we know what they mean by "Free Trial." You get to suffer for nothing.
Before anything else, we had to download their proprietary front-end client. Glad I didn't decide to do this on the linux box... The first thing I noticed was they didn't have a lot of stuff *I* would want. (No NEVERMORE!!! BAH!!!) The next thing I noticed was that even if you downloaded it, that doesn't mean you can BURN it to CD. I was OK with that, to a point. Here's where we get into the things I wasn't OK with:
- in order to burn a CD from what you've downloaded you have to BUY the number of tracks you want (or need) to burn. We decided 40 tracks would be good, so that was around $37 or so... That's more than most CDs, new. Kind of expensive, if you ask me.
- in order to actually burn a disc, you need to download and install Roxio's proprietary burn engine. Ugh. I'll live. I vastly prefer to use NERO, but since all the tracks are encoded WMA files, you really have no choice.
- did I mention the WMAs are encoded so you can't burn them with any other software? Grrr. I like having a CHOICE, especially when the proprietary software is buggier than a farmer's market in July.
- Roxio's burning software is not ready for prime time. I found out, after having it crash in the middle of "buffering" the music that there's actually a known bug in the software whereby you can't burn more than 17 tracks at a time. This "feature" is not documented anywhere on Pressplay or Roxio's web site as of yesterday.
- when this software crashes and you've purchased download credits -- these credits go bye-bye. You get two burns per CD download credit. If I hadn't called customer service, I wouldn't have known about the bug in the software and I wouldn't have gotten the credits credited BACK IF you didn't call, you could be out serious $$$ quickly. That's crap.
- The CD burning software has limits...you can overcome these limits if you pony up for the pricey version. What are these limits? 74m CDs and only being able to record at 4x....
Anyway, if anyone out there has had positive experiences with this, I'm happy for you. As for me, Pressplay can rot. As soon as I burn the rest of the stuff we "bought," I will be uninstalling the client and waxing all the proprietarily encoded WMA files.
Has anyone found a GOOD pay-for-play/burn company out there? It really is a shame that doing the right thing is such a pain in the ass. If we had used Kazaa, it'd have been done days ago and I wouldn't be posting this. Again, what's the reward for trying to do the right thing?
