Review: ProStudioMasters High-res Music Distribution Site

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
This is a review of the PROSTUDIOMASTERS, a distributor of high-resolution music content: http://www.prostudiomasters.com/

I first ran into this site when I was at Sony’s web site looking at their high-res music page. A link for content took me to ProStudioMasters. What I found was a delightful experience. Modern, interactive and fast user interface that easily leaves all of their competitors behind. When I am interacting with other sites, they feel like what music distribution looked before iTunes revolution. Primitive web sites, lousy payment methods, and all around ancient experience. What a breath of fresh air it was to land on ProStudioMasters and not see most of these issues. Let me dig in to show you why.

User Interface
Here it is:



Modern, “web 2.0” interface that is a delight to look at, and highlights the album art nicely.

Notice how under each album you see the highest download and bit rate available. A lot of time I avoid 44.1 KHz content because I can find it much cheaper on CD (although not always) and want to see that before I dig in. This interface lets me do that. Competing sites don’t show this and you only see the info after you drill down into the album

Relative to other sites such as HDtracks, the web site is very fast. What takes 4-5 seconds there, takes 1-2 seconds here. This is a big deal if you are browsing and sampling a lot of music as I usually do.

The best part is this: click on any album and you get a pop up for that album to preview or buy:



No, this is not the magic. The magic comes when you click on those preview play buttons: in 99% of the cases you can listen to the entire track!!! Yes, you read that right. No 30 second preview. If you like, you can preview the full album! Priceless.

This, together with high performance of the site makes it great to sample and buy. Every visit there costs me $200 because of this :). You can literally spend one or two hours there, sampling and buying music. This alone makes the site a top choice for me.

You see three tabs here, one for the track listing above and the second shows editorial and professional reviews:



Small thing but nice: when you are listening to the tracks and click on this tab, the music continues to play. On HDtracks for example, music will stop. Why? I like to keep previewing as I read about the title. Also different from HDtracks is that I have yet to find a single album that doesn’t have populated editorial/reviews. On HDtracks 20 to 30% of the time I find a one-liner copyright message and that is it. I routinely decide to purchase an album based on what I read here.

Clicking the third tab gives data on technical aspects of the recording:


Alas, this is not always here. On the previous album it just had the sampling rate (the first line) and that was it. On the positive side, it sometimes has more detail like exactly what was used to record the music and its sample rate, etc.

Purchase Experience
You add albums to the cart and check out as usual. After setting up an account, you can use a credit card like any proper ecommerce site rather than the horrors of horrors, PayPal. The experience is like Amazon, not some third-rate site popping up new logins for PayPal and such. It can remember your credit card information and then check out then is one click away.

HDtracks also supports independent clearing of Credit Cards (in addition to PayPal) but sadly, even though it has a checkbox for this feature, it will not remember your credit card details. While that may be better from security point of view, my fingers fall off typing all that information in on every music purchase. I now use PayPal with my credit card linked to it but I prefer to not do that.

Download Manager
ProStudioMasters is one of only two sites I have found that has its own download manager (the other being HDtracks). The first time it installs the manager and from then on, when you are done paying, it is one click away from automatic invocation:



This is a live shot of my music purchases tonight. Compare this to the abomination that is used by many other sites, requiring clicking on a link and having files be downloaded by the browser, in zip files and such. Everything works beautifully here and if you put your PC to sleep and such, you can restart automatically.

As good as this is, the HDtracks downloader written by JRiver for them beats ProStudioMasters’ in speed. HDtracks downloader is “multi-threaded” which means it downloads multiple tracks at once. This increases the throughput substantially over ProStudioMasters (if you have a very fast link to the Internet which I have). That said, in practice it doesn’t matter much as I download in the background and at some point go and find the files.

Speaking of finding files, that is another minor miss. The ProStudioMasters downloader puts all the files in a folder on your desktop! HDtracks’ one nicely places them in My Music folder under HDtracks name. Small nit but should be fixed. No one keeps their music on their desktop. I suspect they did this because novices may not look for the files in My Music.

Searching
With so much music out there, searching is a key feature. On that front, the implementation here is at best average. Don’t expect anything like Google or Amazon search here. You better spell things right or it won’t find anything. Most of the time I will search their site using google externally.

Compared to HDtracks, the search is actually better. I have much better luck/trust in ProStudioMasters search feature than HDTracks which I practically find useless.

Breath of Content and Pricing
For newly released content, ProStudioMasters, more or less gets the same titles other distributors like HDtracks and Pono get. There are some differences of course as each site has a different deal with respect to independent labels and such. But 80% of what gets release this week, will show up here as well as others.

Where ProStudioMasters falls behind is depth of catalog. Being a newer site it simply does not have what HDtracks has in its catalog. If I were to guess, I would say they have 50 to 60% of what I have been looking for relative to HDtracks. And of course neither holds a candle to sites that focus on say classical music. Or remotely what you find on Amazon or iTunes.

Pricing is more or less competitive. Like others, if they offer multiple sample rates, the price keeps increasing proportional to that. Sometimes this reaches as high as $40! What helps here and with other sites, is subscribing to their newsletter where you routinely get 15 to 20% discount codes. With that, the prices become reasonable premium over CDs and sometimes a bit cheaper. For new releases by the way, the prices are almost always identical to HDtracks within a few cents. So price shopping outside of specials is not that helpful.

Misses
Not all is perfect though. As good as ProStudioMasters is, it still loses to mass market sites like iTunes and Amazon:

1. No user ratings for any albums. HDtracks lacks this too but at least they have sorted albums by “top Jazz” and such. Nothing like that is here. I like to see two ratings: one for content and one for fidelity.

2. No way to know if you have bought some album before. Amazon shows this. It is not hard to program at all. But it is not here. I have gotten to a point where I buy music based on how nice it sounds, not who it is from. So the chance of buying something a second time is high. And unlike Amazon with CDs, I can’t return them.

3. The offered sample rate is often the one in the middle. If for example the max is 192 KHz, it will default to 96 KHz. This is likely done to keep sticker shock away with a lower price but I like to know that there is a higher bit rate available. So I have to keep clicking on the drop down menu to see if there is anything higher. Most of the time there is not so I wind up wasting time there. Thankfully I am still listening to previews but still, this should be fixed with a preference setting.

4. No wish list. No, I am not having anyone go and buy music for me :). I use the wish list to park music there. Why? Because there is no coupon at the moment and there may be tomorrow in my mailbox. HDtracks has a wish list but I find it buggy. Still, I take that over nothing here.

Summary
While I have not used every download site, the ones I have used lag far behind ProStudioMasters. It pains me to say this as I am personal friend with David Chesky, the founder of HDtracks. But I have to be transparent and say that if you want an enjoyable experience shopping for music, ProStudioMasters is it. I still go to HDtracks to buy content they don’t have, or if I have a coupon for HDtracks and don’t have for ProStudioMasters.

ProStudioMasters has my highest recommendation for a high-resolution digital music purchase site.

P.S. I have no commercial connection to ProStudioMasters. I have paid for all of my own music and have not been offered anything extra. Nor do they know I am writing this review.

P.P.S. For Canadian members, you may want to know that ProStudioMasters is located in Canada!
 

BlueFox

Member Sponsor
Nov 8, 2013
1,709
406
405
I will look at it later, but any DSD? Or just all PCM like HD Tracks.
 

jfrech

VIP/Donor
Sep 3, 2012
2,152
749
1,160
Austin
Nice review and good to see hi res downloads taking off a bit. My only issue with this site is I can't see to find how to search by resolution...I'm mostly after the higher res files...
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
Nice review and good to see hi res downloads taking off a bit. My only issue with this site is I can't see to find how to search by resolution...I'm mostly after the higher res files...
The DSD albums that I linked to above are all available in high-rate PCM too. So that is one way to find them although there are a lot more because some don't come in DSD so this search doesn't show them.
 

BlueFox

Member Sponsor
Nov 8, 2013
1,709
406
405
HD Tracks just started selling DSD. I downloaded a Stevie Ray Vaughn Wednesday night, and the 20% coupon for Guitar Greats didn't work. After a few back and forth emails, they realized the coupons weren't working for DSD. I guess DSD is so new they have a few bugs to work out. Anyway I get a $7 credit.
 

dalethorn

Headphone user
Dec 9, 2012
476
7
18
63
Cleveland TN.
dalethorn.com
I purchased a piano rags album from them on 1st April 2017 for $18 USD, and their "download manager" (required for downloading purchases) immediately said "All tracks have been downloaded". Two email exchanges later with their tech support and they haven't helped, and they are now unresponsive. It's looking like I won't get the music tracks I paid for.
 

rbbert

Well-Known Member
Dec 12, 2010
3,820
239
1,000
Reno, NV
I purchased a piano rags album from them on 1st April 2017 for $18 USD, and their "download manager" (required for downloading purchases) immediately said "All tracks have been downloaded". Two email exchanges later with their tech support and they haven't helped, and they are now unresponsive. It's looking like I won't get the music tracks I paid for.
You almost certainly will, just be persistent and patient. I know that for me that is counter-intuitive when purchasing a download.
 

dalethorn

Headphone user
Dec 9, 2012
476
7
18
63
Cleveland TN.
dalethorn.com
You almost certainly will, just be persistent and patient. I know that for me that is counter-intuitive when purchasing a download.

I finally got a response and a separate download link, which they make clear they do NOT like to do. So I got the files that way, but that's also what happened last time, i.e. I have to go through hell each time because they don't have any idea why their "download manager" displays the completed message before it even attempts to start a download.
 

Dr Tone

Member
Apr 24, 2016
52
4
8
I finally got a response and a separate download link, which they make clear they do NOT like to do. So I got the files that way, but that's also what happened last time, i.e. I have to go through hell each time because they don't have any idea why their "download manager" displays the completed message before it even attempts to start a download.

Have you uninstalled and reinstalled their download manager? Does it create a ProStudioMasters folder on your desktop when you run the downloader manually?
 

microstrip

VIP/Donor
May 30, 2010
20,806
4,698
2,790
Portugal
I finally got a response and a separate download link, which they make clear they do NOT like to do. So I got the files that way, but that's also what happened last time, i.e. I have to go through hell each time because they don't have any idea why their "download manager" displays the completed message before it even attempts to start a download.

Yes, I gave up buying from them, and they had some files I was interested. Other file sellers allow us to download without installing custom software, why do not they do as everybody else?
 

dalethorn

Headphone user
Dec 9, 2012
476
7
18
63
Cleveland TN.
dalethorn.com
Yes, I gave up buying from them, and they had some files I was interested. Other file sellers allow us to download without installing custom software, why do not they do as everybody else?

It appears that they, and especially HDTracks, have the biggest catalogs of what people want. That's part of the problem, and I'll wager that the people who own that music are *very* happy to have those downloads tightly controlled. Now I can't prove that, but that IS the industry standard way of doing business. The other problem is that HDTracks is known for gouging people on several levels. In the album I purchased, HDTracks wants $25 and sells 192k only, while ProStudioMasters sells 96k for $18. In the past, a number of people did analysis on HDTracks files and found some of the "high res" were upsampled. But if I remember correctly, HDTracks always says "that's what we were provided, and we don't change anything". Which is fair enough at a bargain price, but not so great at their prices.
 

dalethorn

Headphone user
Dec 9, 2012
476
7
18
63
Cleveland TN.
dalethorn.com
Have you uninstalled and reinstalled their download manager? Does it create a ProStudioMasters folder on your desktop when you run the downloader manually?

I have an email from their customer service now, detailing all of the steps to "remove the old stuff (all of it, hidden or not) and install the new stuff". Personally, as a long-time developer and hacker, you'd have a hard time sneaking any file past me, root kits included. But, I will run their script and report back.

BTW, the album of piano rags is so good, you can use it to compare half a dozen pricy hi-fi systems, and easily hear the tonality differences in each one. Pretty amazing.
 

lbkwhitney

Well-Known Member
Jul 25, 2016
2
0
131
I Agree.

This is a review of the PROSTUDIOMASTERS, a distributor of high-resolution music content: http://www.prostudiomasters.com/

I first ran into this site when I was at Sony’s web site looking at their high-res music page. A link for content took me to ProStudioMasters. What I found was a delightful experience. Modern, interactive and fast user interface that easily leaves all of their competitors behind. When I am interacting with other sites, they feel like what music distribution looked before iTunes revolution. Primitive web sites, lousy payment methods, and all around ancient experience. What a breath of fresh air it was to land on ProStudioMasters and not see most of these issues. Let me dig in to show you why.

User Interface
Here it is:



Modern, “web 2.0” interface that is a delight to look at, and highlights the album art nicely.

Notice how under each album you see the highest download and bit rate available. A lot of time I avoid 44.1 KHz content because I can find it much cheaper on CD (although not always) and want to see that before I dig in. This interface lets me do that. Competing sites don’t show this and you only see the info after you drill down into the album

Relative to other sites such as HDtracks, the web site is very fast. What takes 4-5 seconds there, takes 1-2 seconds here. This is a big deal if you are browsing and sampling a lot of music as I usually do.

The best part is this: click on any album and you get a pop up for that album to preview or buy:



No, this is not the magic. The magic comes when you click on those preview play buttons: in 99% of the cases you can listen to the entire track!!! Yes, you read that right. No 30 second preview. If you like, you can preview the full album! Priceless.

This, together with high performance of the site makes it great to sample and buy. Every visit there costs me $200 because of this :). You can literally spend one or two hours there, sampling and buying music. This alone makes the site a top choice for me.

You see three tabs here, one for the track listing above and the second shows editorial and professional reviews:



Small thing but nice: when you are listening to the tracks and click on this tab, the music continues to play. On HDtracks for example, music will stop. Why? I like to keep previewing as I read about the title. Also different from HDtracks is that I have yet to find a single album that doesn’t have populated editorial/reviews. On HDtracks 20 to 30% of the time I find a one-liner copyright message and that is it. I routinely decide to purchase an album based on what I read here.

Clicking the third tab gives data on technical aspects of the recording:


Alas, this is not always here. On the previous album it just had the sampling rate (the first line) and that was it. On the positive side, it sometimes has more detail like exactly what was used to record the music and its sample rate, etc.

Purchase Experience
You add albums to the cart and check out as usual. After setting up an account, you can use a credit card like any proper ecommerce site rather than the horrors of horrors, PayPal. The experience is like Amazon, not some third-rate site popping up new logins for PayPal and such. It can remember your credit card information and then check out then is one click away.

HDtracks also supports independent clearing of Credit Cards (in addition to PayPal) but sadly, even though it has a checkbox for this feature, it will not remember your credit card details. While that may be better from security point of view, my fingers fall off typing all that information in on every music purchase. I now use PayPal with my credit card linked to it but I prefer to not do that.

Download Manager
ProStudioMasters is one of only two sites I have found that has its own download manager (the other being HDtracks). The first time it installs the manager and from then on, when you are done paying, it is one click away from automatic invocation:



This is a live shot of my music purchases tonight. Compare this to the abomination that is used by many other sites, requiring clicking on a link and having files be downloaded by the browser, in zip files and such. Everything works beautifully here and if you put your PC to sleep and such, you can restart automatically.

As good as this is, the HDtracks downloader written by JRiver for them beats ProStudioMasters’ in speed. HDtracks downloader is “multi-threaded” which means it downloads multiple tracks at once. This increases the throughput substantially over ProStudioMasters (if you have a very fast link to the Internet which I have). That said, in practice it doesn’t matter much as I download in the background and at some point go and find the files.

Speaking of finding files, that is another minor miss. The ProStudioMasters downloader puts all the files in a folder on your desktop! HDtracks’ one nicely places them in My Music folder under HDtracks name. Small nit but should be fixed. No one keeps their music on their desktop. I suspect they did this because novices may not look for the files in My Music.

Searching
With so much music out there, searching is a key feature. On that front, the implementation here is at best average. Don’t expect anything like Google or Amazon search here. You better spell things right or it won’t find anything. Most of the time I will search their site using google externally.

Compared to HDtracks, the search is actually better. I have much better luck/trust in ProStudioMasters search feature than HDTracks which I practically find useless.

Breath of Content and Pricing
For newly released content, ProStudioMasters, more or less gets the same titles other distributors like HDtracks and Pono get. There are some differences of course as each site has a different deal with respect to independent labels and such. But 80% of what gets release this week, will show up here as well as others.

Where ProStudioMasters falls behind is depth of catalog. Being a newer site it simply does not have what HDtracks has in its catalog. If I were to guess, I would say they have 50 to 60% of what I have been looking for relative to HDtracks. And of course neither holds a candle to sites that focus on say classical music. Or remotely what you find on Amazon or iTunes.

Pricing is more or less competitive. Like others, if they offer multiple sample rates, the price keeps increasing proportional to that. Sometimes this reaches as high as $40! What helps here and with other sites, is subscribing to their newsletter where you routinely get 15 to 20% discount codes. With that, the prices become reasonable premium over CDs and sometimes a bit cheaper. For new releases by the way, the prices are almost always identical to HDtracks within a few cents. So price shopping outside of specials is not that helpful.

Misses
Not all is perfect though. As good as ProStudioMasters is, it still loses to mass market sites like iTunes and Amazon:

1. No user ratings for any albums. HDtracks lacks this too but at least they have sorted albums by “top Jazz” and such. Nothing like that is here. I like to see two ratings: one for content and one for fidelity.

2. No way to know if you have bought some album before. Amazon shows this. It is not hard to program at all. But it is not here. I have gotten to a point where I buy music based on how nice it sounds, not who it is from. So the chance of buying something a second time is high. And unlike Amazon with CDs, I can’t return them.

3. The offered sample rate is often the one in the middle. If for example the max is 192 KHz, it will default to 96 KHz. This is likely done to keep sticker shock away with a lower price but I like to know that there is a higher bit rate available. So I have to keep clicking on the drop down menu to see if there is anything higher. Most of the time there is not so I wind up wasting time there. Thankfully I am still listening to previews but still, this should be fixed with a preference setting.

4. No wish list. No, I am not having anyone go and buy music for me :). I use the wish list to park music there. Why? Because there is no coupon at the moment and there may be tomorrow in my mailbox. HDtracks has a wish list but I find it buggy. Still, I take that over nothing here.

Summary
While I have not used every download site, the ones I have used lag far behind ProStudioMasters. It pains me to say this as I am personal friend with David Chesky, the founder of HDtracks. But I have to be transparent and say that if you want an enjoyable experience shopping for music, ProStudioMasters is it. I still go to HDtracks to buy content they don’t have, or if I have a coupon for HDtracks and don’t have for ProStudioMasters.

ProStudioMasters has my highest recommendation for a high-resolution digital music purchase site.

P.S. I have no commercial connection to ProStudioMasters. I have paid for all of my own music and have not been offered anything extra. Nor do they know I am writing this review.

P.P.S. For Canadian members, you may want to know that ProStudioMasters is located in Canada!

:)
 

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