Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

I first wrote about HDtracks originally in October and I thought it was a pretty cool service.  At that time, I wasn’t able to test out their HD music. 

Recently, Gibson partnered up with HDtracks to offer their own special album in HD and I quickly jumped on the opportunity to listen to the music in HD.  Before I start talking about the quality of the music, I want to briefly go over the download and installation process.  This way if you want to purchase something off HDtracks, you will know how it works ahead of time.

Installation

Basically, you first have to make an account and then decide what music/album you are going to buy.  After that, you have to download a program, which is connected with your online account.  In addition, it makes a new folder on the desktop called My HDtracks Music and all downloaded music automatically goes there.  On your own time, you are able to download and pause the music you have opted in purchasing.  For some odd reason, once I opened the program on my desktop to begin the downloading process, it didn’t work right away and I had to close the program and then open it.  Once I did that, it worked fine.

HD Music - is it really worth it?

Music, just like videos, come in different quality standards.  Some are specially encoded to take up less space on your hard drive, meaning that such music won’t be as of high quality as music that is fully uncompressed which would take up a lot of space.  Now, when I downloaded the Gibson album, I went with MP3 format encoded in 320kbps, I figured that most people would download it this way as well.  However, you can also download it in AIFF and FLAC formats.  Once the music started playing, I could definitely hear the difference between this and my normal music.  The song seemed to have much more “life,” if you will, as well as a lot more clarity.  It was possible to hear the individual notes and instruments during the song.

Final opinions

I love music, but all I really need are normal songs, it doesn’t have to be high quality or HD.  For me, I would spend my $2.49 on a single song or $15.98 for an album somewhere else.  That being said, if I really cared about my music and wanted the absolute best quality, I might be inclined to purchase my music from HDtracks.  If they lower their prices a bit, I could see them becoming pretty popular.

Download the Album [HDtracks]