[UPDATE] I received an email from PureTracks today, November 1st, over two months after the original with the following two lines of text, including the typo:

We apologize for the delay in resolving this issue however it is not resolved and you should be able to download the gift order. Please let us know if you have further questions.

I can only assume that “not resolved” means “now resolved”. Gee, thanks. All I can say is, wow. I had forgotten how angry I was with PureTracks, but help desk support like this brings it right back to the forefront of my mind.

Original post from August 25th: PureTracks is an online music service a la iTunes. Aside from the fact that is uses crappy DRM (which is why I’ve avoided it until now), the reason I’m complaining today is that as a new user, I can’t believe how much frustration I’m experiencing. I’m a seasoned computer user, and their site so unbelievably hard to use, it makes me want to throw my computer through my window.

There are two tracks that are not easy to find elsewhere that are available on PureTracks that I wanted to download. Since I don’t have a PureTracks account, I asked a friend to download them for me. He discovered that there’s an option to send them to a friend rather than download them himself, and since we were nervous about their DRM scheme, we decided that would be the easiest way to go.

Well. Of course, I can’t just get the tracks – I have to register with PureTracks, which is what I wanted to avoid in the first place. But worse, once I register, the songs are nowhere to be found. I finally discovered that the email address they were gifted to was different than the one I registered with, although it wasn’t obvious anywhere that they needed to be the same, and since I receive mail from multiple accounts to the same location, it didn’t dawn on me that they might be different. Anyway, I change my email address, and now a line shows up in my order history. Clicking it, however, just takes me right to their main page!

After some discussion, I discover that PureTracks does not support Firefox well, so I ought to try IE. Well, in a word, that SUCKS. But I try it. Same deal. So my friend is out $1.50 (they’re short tracks), and I can’t get the songs. PureTracks, I was avoiding you before, but now I want nothing to do with you ever. If you see me coming down the street, you’d better cross to the other side.

[Update] I received a reply from PureTracks’ support over 12 hours after I sent my reply to their initial canned “turn off your popup blockers” message. Twelve hours! And guess, just guess what it said? “Please log in to our support system, as replies to support emails are not supported.” What a steaming pile of crap! It took their system twelve hours to reply with a canned response stating that replies are not supported? I couldn’t be angrier! To make matters worse, when you click the link to go to your support ticket, their site just redirects you to their login screen (even if you’re logged in). So you have to navigate to their help page, then scroll to the VERY LAST FUCKING LINE, to click the link to get to their help desk. And, of course, my call is “on hold”, since I must be a complete fucking idiot.

PureTracks – It’s clear that you hate your customers, and I hate you right back more than you can possibly imagine. You are pure evil.

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