Chris Drumgoole

These guys are a bunch of scammers.

Noteburner is a clever piece of software supposed to easily convert your DRM’d tracks (from any service, not just iTunes) into nice MP3’s. “Great”, I thought, as I’ll want to be able to play the music I legally purchased in Linux when I make the move this week.

Noteburner does this by cleverly creating a virtual CD-RW in the middle, so in iTunes, you go to create a audio CD from the selected tracks, and Noteburner takes over by reencoding them to MP3.

So, I plunked down the US $40, thinking it would work like a charm - I did a little research, I didn’t see any complaints. One concern that I had was whether the ID3 tags would be preserved (Album, artist, track name, etc.). The features list of the product claims that it does.

Click on the above thumbnail to see a screen capture of the features page for Noteburner. I outlined the feature in question.

After I made the purchase, I got an email with the registration code. That worked fine. I then proceeded to convert my DRM’d tracks.

Something I found that was odd is it only grabbed the track name and artist. Not the album name, genera, or other tags. Hmm, that sucks. No album art either, I presume - although that wasn’t promised.

I then double checked to see if I had it configured correctly according to the (albeit limited) instructions online. I did.

So, I emailed tech support over the weekend.

Today, during my day, I get an email back from tech support, a person by the name of “Cui Jenny”. Hmm, I see what’s going on here - these guys are Chinese. Interesting side note - there is zero information about the company on their site at all. Only an email address. Shame on me for not doing enough due diligence.

Any way, the tech support person wrote:

Dear Chris Drumgoole,

Thank you for your support.

We are sorry there are problems in iTunes and it cannot burn music with
complete tag information. Sorry for any inconveniences.

Any other problems, please contact us.

Regards,
Cui Jenny

Excuse me?! I’m sorry, that is unacceptable. The website clearly states that the product “Preserves ID3 tags for artist, album, title names etc.” It clearly doesn’t, now does it… No where (that I could find) does the site have any fine print disclaimers stating “Sorry, iTunes doesn’t work”.

I am demanding my money back…. I’ll keep you up to date of any developments. I doubt I’ll get a response…

Don’t buy this product.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 5:15 pm and is filed under China, Commentary, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.