Alex Stone

So, Nine Inch Nails (or just NIN fans. I’m not sure, really. My money’s on the latter) release this awesome remix album featuring all of the top fan-made remixes (you see, Trent Reznor has made a bunch of songs [all of them, I think] available as “open source” tracks, readily available for legal remixing and sharing).

Great right? Almost.

Everything is awesome until you try to download the thing. This is how I can tell this isn’t a sanctioned NIN release. It’s difficult as all get out to acquire it. For some reason, the people in charge of this opted to use MediaFire. AKA the worse possible way to share anything with anyone short of not sharing it at all.

Bandcamp would have made sense here. Soundcloud would have made sense here. A torrent option would have been PERFECT for everyone involved.

Here’s the MediaFire process

1. Open the URL
2. Close a link asking you to upgrade to Pro
3. Select the check all button to try and batch download the 21 files
4. Close an ad telling you you can’t do that unless you pay $7/mo
5. Sigh in frustration that you have to download individual files one at a time.
6. Click the first download button
7. Go to another ad-covered download page
8. Close a pop up ad
9. Wait 10 seconds for the download to start because you’re not using a Pro account
10. Hope that the server is good enough to deliver the file as an attachment and not as a media link to my browser
11. Go back to the file page
12. Repeat steps 6 - 11 twenty more times.