I shouldn't even mention this to a bunch of hifi geeks but it's just too dang good to not at least give it a shot. Basically my own dreams of downloadable MP3s has been realized. This service blows iTunes out of the water in my opinion. The "catch" is that you will have to do a little more fiddly work on your end. But not really. You know how iTunes charges 99 cents per
song? Well, how would you like to pay 99 cents per full
album? Actually more like 2 bucks per album depending on how long it is and what bitrate you want. Yes, you can choose the compression method you want and there's even some where you can download lossless FLACs or even the friggin' WAV data! Sheesh!
The site is
http://www.allofmp3.com which is a Russian site. I read the legal blather and it seems quasi-legit. More or less they say they paid a licensing fee and non-Russians are on their own if they decide to use it yadda yadda yadda. But I don't really know or care about any of that, they are simply offering a better service than iTunes and without the F&*)ED up iTunes software. And the price is just right. You pay 2 cents per megabyte. I can only imagine that the RIAA would love nothing more than to shut these guys down, but I really hope not. I hope it sticks around.
The user interface is great, the selection of music is great and the sound ain't too bad. It also has more encoding choices than iTunes. The fiddly bit, if you care about such things, is that you have to rename the files so they look nice, but even so the ID3 tags will have the basic info in there. For an investment of about $135 I've downloaded about 100 complete albums, usually at 192 or 320K. Regardless of any theoretical or actual shortcomings of compressed formats I must say that's one helluva value. It's like raiding the cut-out bin, only the cut-out bin is the whole store!
So if you've got a link up to ye olde Fat Pipe it is quite a sweet deal IMO.