eMusic problems

I'd like the experience of those of you who have dealt with eMusic. I signed up for eMusic about a week before their recent decimating announcement. Since then, I've been trying to find and download as much as possible before their new policy kicks in.

Is it everyone else's experience that some tracks work just fine, some refuse to get started at all and some will send only a few kB at a time?

The latter is particularly frustrating under MacOS X, where their client refuses to restart partial downloads, starting fresh each time. Even better, it often claims that tracks falling in both of the failing types are completed, so I have to verify all of my music after it downloads. At least they seem to always put on trailing ID3v1 tags, so I can just check for their existence.

Anyway, I just wanna know if this is typical or if I'm getting screwed up somewhere.

Definitely typical. I've been fighting this since the day they announced the changes. Stalls, errors, incomplete downloads all over the place. I now have to babysit every album, wait eons for a track to start, and when it errs out, cancel it, then resume it to get it to try yet again. I'm fairly pissed at this point, but there's not much that can be done. I guess they are just being slammed by everyone trying to download all they can before they cancel. Support is unresponsive, no message boards... what a mess.

edit: And Matt's correct. It worked flawlessly before the announcement.

I'd say this is typical behavior post-announcement. It sounds like the mac client is better than the windows one, as it generally freezes on a file in the "Requesting File" stage and never moves on. You can shut it down and restart, and it usualy works, but it always looses the track that's in the requesting stage. I've noticed that late at night works a lot better, so I'm not sure if it's intentional or the capacity is just overwhelmed with all the last minute leeching.

FWIW, everything used to work perfectly. To think, we used to complain that you could only que up 50 tracks to download at once. The Good Old Days. I'm kind of annoyed because the whole point of paying for legal mp3s is that it should be easy and you shouldn't have to check each album to see if it's complete.

Matthew

Loren, I'm not completely sure where your tastes lie, but if you want to grab anything I've downloaded off emusic tonight, you're welcome to. That reminds me, I need to stop by the bank on my way home this afternoon, you've got the receiver, right?

Matthew

Yup, reveiver is in the car. I even dug out the software cd for ya. I'll be there around 6:30 with a trunk full of soon to be installed audio fun.

We'll do an emusic comparison, even though my empeg is in an organizational mess right now as i transfer stuff to and from work and retag my entire collection before the final car install. But i've got a good bit of random stuff from emusic. =]

Well, I've used both the Windows and MacOS X clients. I'm trying to avoid my Windows machine right now because I think I've got some flaky memory.

When the Windows client does the ``Requesting File'' thing, the MacOS X client immediately claims that it's completed, writing out a zero-length file. But at least it doesn't hang up.

But the big problem is that the files that on the Windows client require a hundred clicks of the Resume button to get it to complete are, on the MacOS X client, marked as either errored out or completed when it stops. In either case, if you try to start it again, you start from the beginning. And since you can download at most a few hundred kB at a time, it's impossible to finish. I've been relegated to using the Windows machine for those files and hoping that the memory doesn't corrupt them.

Too bad. The big draw to me for eMusic wasn't necessarily that I could download absurd amounts of music, but that I could try out stuff in the privacy of my home without having to pay for each individual thing. If I didn't like it, fine; I could just delete it, no worse other than the time spent getting it than if I'd not gotten it. That's what I was looking forward to, and the stuff they have fits that idea perfectly.

Damn, i didn't notice it until you said you'd been getting zero-length files... but i have too on my windows client. It said download completed but the files are zero-length on a few random songs. Dammit!!!! Now i have to go back and individually fight each download. grrr.

I'm really dissappointed in the new plans because i'd just gotten to the point that i'd downloaded all the artists i already like, and was using their recommendations features to find a bunch of really good similar artists. Ah well.

because I think I've got some flaky memory.

I assume you've run Memtest86

Yeah. I've got some really flaky memory and some not-so-flaky. I'm not sure if the latter is really flaky or not; I think it is, and I'm laboring under that conception. Regardless, I've got an RMA for all of it. I just need to get around to sending it in.

Damn. Now I can barely get anything downloaded at all.

Yeah, it's getting worse and worse. I've succeeded in downloading 1 track in the last hour.

I also miss the recommendations from the boards. There always seemed to be a topic that had some good music listed, and a lot of it was older music additions that I had never heard of before.

They really should have considered some sort of different pricing plans or a more relaxed ease into the plans they implemented. They are sealing their demise with this horseshite

I wouldn't mind some kind of limit but 40 isn't enough with the system they have now. I would be happy with 40 if they had unlimited streaming so I could find bands I like and then download their cd's. If they did that i'm sure people would probably abuse somehow.

Another Emusic user here with similar problems...

Post announcement, the service went down the tubes... One bright spot is after the deadline, you are supposed to be able to re-download any previously downloaded track without it acting against your 40 a month limit.

Small comfort, but I gots to clean out me stash...

Of course, you have to manage to actually download it first, or at least get them to think you have.

Wow, this morning i was cranking along for about 4 hours like nothing had ever happened, then when i got back from lunch it went back to not being able to get anything. Weird.

Just to note... it's screaming along now... with only occasional hiccups. Get to downloading!

And it's still going. It's nice to be able to download things again.

Does anyone have any 12th hour reccomendations?

Matthew

I stumbled on Pedro the Lion on eMusic, but I've been filling in a lot of gaps more than anything else.

They have four different David Wilcox albums, three of which I downloaded during my trial. If you like acoustic-folk type stuff, he's excellent. The live albums is more of the "storytelling" experience where the studio projects really focus on his ability to capture and sing about life.

You guys able to get anything now? I haven't been able to get a single track all morning.

I haven't tried since the night before last. And I can't try right now (at fascist workplace).

You know, conceivably the worst part is being unable to listen to the samples.

agreed. I haven't been able to get one sample since the announcement. The downloads come and go though. So instead of just listening to samples i'm blind downloading full albums.

Exactly. And I'm trying to do it so fast, I'm not bothering to listen to them. So I wouldn't be surprised if I end up deleting a lot of it.

Have you given iTunes a shot? At the very least you could use it to listen to samples. Assuming, of course, they carry the same tracks as eMusic.

It's worth a shot....

I did finally get iTunes installed yesterday, and deleted it after about 15 minutes of tinkering. I won't go into all of my dislikes... but the bigger problem is that they don't have most of what i want from emusic to sample anyhow. Ah well, i'll just continue to bulk download and delete what i don't like until the cutoff date. =]

Here's a tip if you right click on the "download album" link and save the .emp file it will show you downloaded the album in your collection.