I liked the samples of the Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV albums well enough, and I like FLAC well enough, that I figured I’d just buy the whole thing (USD5) rather than go with the free tracks. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for, right, FLAC without needing the physical CD?
Cut to three days later. I can only download the thing between midnight and noon, thanks to the bandwidth needed (it’s a 600MB download). I have now downloaded it something like ten times, at least in part (about 4GB of downloads and counting now). For a while they didn’t have the bandwidth resources. Now they do, but the ZIP file is corrupt or something (and not just on picky Linux systems, I can’t unpack it using Windows Explorer or WinZip either). The download almost always cuts out at about 300 MB anyway and for some reason their webservers do not do 206 Partial Content, so down it all comes again every time I request it.
It turns out the brave new world of CD quality downloadable albums must be a while away yet. One thing that would have been helpful would be allowing me to download each track individually. Even leaving aside the corrupt ZIP file issue (their tech support has not replied yet) at least I’d have most of them by now, and not be slamming their servers with several requests for a 600MB file per night as wget keeps retrying.
(Edit: apparently the whole album is CC-BY-SA-NC anyway, so it can be obtained via torrents already and one day I’m sure I’ll even learn how to use them. It’s taking my firewall settings up and down that sounds like a nuisance.)