Great online music store!

[Blacklaw]

Just decided to take the plunge and join All of MP3 (http://www.allofmp3.com), a Russian music download site. It's kinda like iTunes, but the music isn't DRM-crippled in any way.

You pick your songs, choose the encoding method (selection of codecs available in a range of qualities), and they encode it there and then. When downloading, you pay per megabyte. So, Avril Lavigne's 'Complicated' on iTunes would cost you $0.99. On this site, it costs $0.06 at 192Kb/s. Some albums are even available in true CD-audio PCM format for burning back to a CD, although you'll be paying a premium as the file sizes will be huge. Remember that a full 74 minute audio CD will hold 640MB, which is $6.40 in bandwidth fees. However, they also support a bunch of lossless compression codecs (including Windows Media 9 Lossless for all the Microsofties out there) to bring this total down as far as possible.

As far as anyone can tell, the site is perfectly legal, thanks to several loopholes in Russian copyright law - they're using a licence originally designed for radio broadcasters to have access to music.

Being a bit iffy about sending my credit card details to deepest, darkest Russia, I decided to use the PayPal payment option. $10 later, I had a 1GB download credit in my account.

The music is top-quality, by the way.

And if you happen to have any CDs that they're looking for (see the Wanted section), you can upload it for double credits. So if you upload 50MB worth of music, you get 100MB of download credit free.

I highly recommend it - join before the RIAA have a hissy fit.

-Blacklaw

[]cibyr[]

OMG! This is JUST what I need to piss off my IPT teacher who won't let me play MP3s off my flash drive that I've ripped off my own CDs - which is actually illegal here.

[Blacklaw]

Oooh, discovering lots of Shiny! features here...

First up, although the links vanish from My Downloads after you've grabbed them, you *can* recover aborted downloads and corrupt files so long as you don't close the links list.

Second, there's an Explorer programme for Windows users to download that is almost exactly like iTunes - makes downloading music easier. Supports pausing/resuming, automatically downloading once online encoding is complete, sorting into folders according to filename, and you can even write little love notes to tech support through it.

Finally, and possibly the sneakiest yet, it has an 'auto rename' function which will rename your chosen file to have a different extension before the download process - such as .ZIP, .XLS, .DOC, .HTM... Now, can anyone think of a use for that? ;)

-Blacklaw

[Paul]

Nice find Blacklaw (y)

edit:
Just downloaded Maroon 5's album (Songs About Jane) (mp3 192kbps) and it only cost 35p.... great (y)

[Karl]

Are you guaranteed that a portion of the cash is going to the artist?

[RTT]

Probably not no - it's a strange setup. As I understand it, the Russian equivalent of the RIAA called ROMS automatically claims copyright to 'material'. Since allofmp3 have been licenced by ROMS, technically they are a genuine vendor of music, just like iTunes have all the relevant stuff from the RIAA (or whoever) [i assume anyway...] in order to distribute music legally. It's a bit of a grey area as far as the legality of it goes, but i can't see the difference between using allofmp3 and iTunes, since they're both licenced with the appropriate authorities. Surely it's no different from importing a CD from a US music store?

Edit : found this (http://www.museekster.com/romsinterview.htm) and it appears the bands do get a cut! Amazing!

ooops, rambled a bit there