Puretracks "DRM-free music" mystery explained

This morning, I blogged about Puretracks, a Canadian downloadable music store that announced that it was going to be selling 50,000 of its tracks as DRM-free MP3s. Users who visited that site were given messages telling htem that they weren't able to get the tracks because they lacked Windows. What's more, every band I checked had only DRMed music. Now the mystery is solved.

Isabelle sez, "I'm the director of marketing at Puretracks and a big fan of BoingBoing. I wanted to give you an update on your post about our MP3 offering that just rolled out. The first thing to mention is that we really do have 50,000 MP3s for sale in Canada . But we don't have Mac support at the moment. This is a side effect of our business reality. The entire first version of the store was based around the WMA (DRM'd) format, and it has been a monumental task switching our database and everything to support the new format. Several of these pieces, including our Download Manager, are still based on ActiveX controls and other non-Mac-friendly mechanisms so Mac users cannot purchase and downloads songs from Puretracks as of yet. But we WILL support the Macs, and the MP3 rollout is our first step towards being able to actually do that." Link