new purchase download pages

Last week, I introduced new purchased download pages. The main changes are:

1) the artwork is at the top, so you can't miss it, since all our albums now have artwork
2) the formats are split between "recommended" and "other" to make things simpler for most people
3) there are "suggestions" for what formats to download

I'm also transitioning from an old URL system for downloads that was
http://magnatune.com/all/first_40_characters_of_albumname

that redirected to a really long url:
http://magnatune.com/artists/music/genre/artistname/albumname/download.html

the reason for the "/all" redirect is that I don't want the download URL to wrap in people's email programs, because if that happens, most people get confused when the url doesn't work right. So, short URLs.

But, I'm now redirecting users to:
http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/albumsku/download

which is shorter and more logical, and the album-sku is always short. However, this is still too long. Probably, what I'll do is shorten it even further to:
http://magnatune.com/a/albumsku/d

where is "a" is an alias (nickname) for /artists/albums/ and "d" is short for "download". That way I can get rid of /d/ altogether.

The same thing exists for all the mp3 files that people listen to. They're also in /all/ -- you wouldn't think this would be needed, given that those mp3 files are played by music players, but it turns out some music players can't handle long mp3 filenames or paths, so the /all/ shorthand names were needed to work around that. What I'm moving to for that is what I have now:

http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/albumsku/01.mp3

and eventually this'll point to
http://magnatune.com/a/albumsku/01.mp3

why "eventually" ? Because, I want to make sure that all the links into magnatune from other sites keep working, so what I do is make one change at a time, put in redirects from the previous place, and then have *everyone* use the redirects, so I hear if they're not working right. Then, once I know they're ok, I point all the current users to the actual files, so they aren't slowed down by the redirectors, but I'm secure in my knowledge that outside links to magnatune songs still work.

Since hundreds of thousands of blogs and web sites link into magnatune, I want to make sure their deep links continue to work, rather than being redirect to the home page when a deep link breaks.

-john

Comments

[pfelelep]

thank you so much.

[Kirk McElhearn]

I don't understand the "Mac iTunes" and "Mac MP3" formats. They work on PCs as well, and the MP3s even work on Linux. An unsophisticated user, who has iTunes on Windows, may think that the files are not compatible.

Also, why not mention the bit rate for the AAC files?