Counting downloads

When you click the download button, the track's download count increases, even if you back out before starting the download. Thankfully, if you go back and re-download, the download count doesn't increase again. So, so far so good.
But a real problem arises when you download one of the previous mix steps that are offered as HQ downloads in the same download window. These are not added to the track in question or anywhere else.

So, if the number of downloads on a track is a valued or valuable metric, it's probably best not to offer the previous steps as downloads unless these "counting errors" have been resolved. Nevertheless, omitting the previous HQ downloads also encourages people to leave a thumbs up (or comment) for every downloaded track. ;)

Thanks for all the good work! <3

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Valid points, I'll think about this.
Forcing the user to go down to several track steps would require a lot of extra clicks, and you also need to be familiar with the quickest way to go "up" in a remix tree, so I'm not sure this is not too much of an obstacle for the user.
To add the download count for the previous steps does indeed make sense, I would need to re-vamp the limited downloads per day handling for free members first - that currently counts accessing one tracks downloads as ONE download, regardless of how many single tracks are involved here, which I would like to keep that way to keep the limited account worthwhile.

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Yes, indeed. I've been thinking if I should answer you in private but decided to post it here to 'keep it bundled'. It's however not my intention to start a programming discussion here. ;)

Where you start downloading the track-number is already set and matches the desired track, just like the previous mix-tracks have their track-number already determined. So through the eye of a layman like me to 'revamp' the current and preferred method of downloading seems doable within the current structure. B) But being that layman of course I can be terribly wrong.

Those track limitations for free users are probably stored in a separate field also. So to prevent tricking the system by the free users you could free the download of previous tracks only AFTER they downloaded the track they are on, which then not only prevent the counting of just opening the download window. A possible problem remaining however are the unfinished or interrupted downloads, but that might be inventing problems that hardly or don't exist and maybe aren't in the scope to be addressed.

Only one issue in this flow left untouched, when you want to download both the mixed and HQ track. I've personally used that as a negative sound to isolate the following mix-step and never worried if that was counted separately or not. Of course hoping there won't be too much artifacts left but that's the users problem. And nowadays drums and vocals are reasonably well separated by an tool like Acon Digital Remix I think even ProTools finally has a similar plugin since a little over a year. :D

Anyway, good luck and I hope you find some inspiration in my ventilated thoughts.
And again, it's not my intention to start a programming discussion here. ;)

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