[nathanm]

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.

[miklorsmith]

That's awesome!  MP3 has a place in the world and my setup too.  Never critical listening, but for traveling it can't be beat.

[nathanm]

If you come across the ones which have the "EX" icon those are available in original CD-DA format.  Now, obviously downloading 650MB or so isn't going to be terribly swift, but for what iTunes charges for 128K MP3s you're getting uncompressed WAV data.  But to my mind if I am going to pay 15 bucks AT ALL I will opt for buying the real CD, but a 2 dollar 320K MP3 version is mighty close!  I think it's easy to be conned by the sheer principle that data compression=bad sound moreso than the actual listening.

It really allowed me to experiment and try out things I normally wouldn't want to take a chance on, so for sheer musical research it's unbeatable.  I downloaded a 1953 EMI recording of Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" at 320K and I'd critically listen to that any day.  Huge dynamics, wonderful soundstage, no clipping and really cool beating of big honkin' metal sheets for thunder effects.  They knew what they were doing back then!

One bummer however about MP3s is that they cause gaps where two songs are overlapped.  This is problematic when making CDs.  But like I said, for 2 bucks I'm willing to make a few sacrifices!  Actually on the Purcell disc I did go in and edit out the gaps with a WAV editor.  There are probably better ways out there of dealing with these gaps which I am not aware of too.

[kfr01]

I also noticed that some of the selections allow encoding in lossless FLAC format.  --- Finally --- !  

(signing up as we speak).

[Thump553]

I've heard bad things about how legal this site really is, but I haven't investigated it.  One thing for sure is that I am NOT giving out my credit card or personal info to ANY site based in Russia.

According to this morning's paper Yahoo has started up a music service that greatly undercuts the other major one's prices.

[gitarretyp]

Here's a nice site that summarizes the legallity of allofmp3 http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3info.htm. It seems that there is a loophole in russian law that allows electronic/digital distribution of music. They claim to pay the writers of the music through the Russian Federation Copyright And Related Rights Law. However, the performers, record labels, producers, etc do not receive any profit.

It also notes that your credit card info is not given to them but processed through a 3rd party, Cyberplat, which seems to be the russian equivalent of paypal.

Note, i do not use allofmp3. I just wanted to supply some of the info i found while considering joining the service.