DelayedReaction

So Slashdot has a post about a service called "AllOfMP3" (http://www.allofmp3.com). It looks pretty decent, with prices set at $0.01 per MB of download (so your average 320kb costs around a nickel), and the selection isn't half bad. What do you guys think about this service, and does anyone have any experience with it?

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, you must be having an orgasm.

Grondar

I am of the mindset that if I am going to pay for music I'll go buy the album..

Paying to download doesn't appeal to me at all...

__________________
"Yes, I rather like this God fellow. He's very theatrical, you know, a pestilence here, a plague there. Omnipotence. Gotta get me some of that." -Stewie

The_wall

true grondar, kazaa lite is holding strong at a price of free =)

__________________
"We do what we like and we like what we do!"~andrew Wk

Procrastinate now, don't put off to the last minute.

k1ng

My roommate and I have used this and I was really impressed with it. It's a lot cheaper than other places that charge $1/song. They even accept Paypal, which is great because you can sell one of your audio cds on ebay and then use that money to download 20 albums from allofmp3.com. That sure as hell beats any used cd store's trade-in ratio=)

__________________
"Delight in excellence is easily confused with snobbery by the ignorant." -Joseph Epstein

k1ng

What about *complete* albums that you can't easily find on kazaa? Sure, download the easy-to-find albums, but this site is great for those hard-to-find&download albums.

__________________
"Delight in excellence is easily confused with snobbery by the ignorant." -Joseph Epstein

brandon11983

Agreed. Why pay for a piss poor MP3 when I can get the full quality CD for not much more?

__________________
Well behaved women rarely make history.

Strange Famous

They dont seem to have a massive selection of hip hop, or maybe I just wasn't searching right - but I coudnt find any tracks for Remedy or Cage, so I just gave up on the idea based on that.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

lordjeebus

I've been using this service for a while.

The selection isn't the greatest but I think it's pretty good. And they add 10-20 albums every day. They have complete Beatles, Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, David Bowie, etc. catalogs. Which is really nice considering the cost of accumulating such collections at a store, or the effort it would take to get all that through Kazaa.

lordjeebus

The cost is a cent per megabyte, so depending on quality an album costs .50 - 2.00 dollars, on average.

You can get encoding that is far from piss poor (LAME alt-preset-insane, etc.) so it's a question of how much you're willing to pay for the difference between the best of mp3 or aac encoding (both of which are available) and a cd. They're even introducing some sort of lossless encoding option.

DelayedReaction

What about the legality of what they're doing? From what I understand, while it may be legal in Russia, Americans may be violating copyright law. Anybody with legal experience know?

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, you must be having an orgasm.

tritium

Sounds like wiggle room for allofmp3.com on the international scale... "Don't blame us" sorta thing. I'm skeptical.

__________________
Blah.

Aletheia

There are ways.

CSflim

I think that this is deffinately how its going to be. With more and more people getting broadband internet connections, and with the industry's dawning realization that p2p is not going to go away, this is the best way that they can embrace it.

I simply can't afford to buy albums at €23.00 a go (€1~=$1), I simply don't have the money, so I do download a lot of my music/rip it from friends cds. €23 is nothing other than blantant profiteering,there is absolutely no reason for cds to cost this much.

I would be more than happy to pay for reasonably priced music.

I'm also interested in the legality of the site.

I think, ideally, in the future, it would be good to see artist's selling their music directly to their audience (or through a site such as this) for very reasonable prices, with a large proportion of the sale going directly to the artists.

Howver, such a set up would be next to impossible given the current artistic climate where record companies essentially own the souls of their signed artists.

__________________

Kaos

When I pay for music...I pay for the CD, the Jewel case and the booklet of art, pictures and lyrics.

DelayedReaction

Because plastic and paper is worth $20?

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, you must be having an orgasm.

charlesesl

I never pay for music. It is a matter of principle.

__________________
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
Dr. Viktor E. Frankl

Speed_Gibson

not new and generally not legal outside of Russia. Note this from their legal info:
---
All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3?-03-79 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting.
---
they have not payed for rights to distribute wordwide. note also an excerpt from this interview -
Museekster: The Wanted Program at your website is considered highly illegal. How can Allofmp3 get away with
this? What is the legal basis of this program according to Russian law?

Allofmp3: We are aware of the fact that uploading tracks may be illegal according to the laws in the country of the customer. That is entirely his own responsibility. Allofmp3 is allowed to use this tracks for our service according to Russian legislation as long as we pay the copyrights to ROMS.

----
the biggest reason I will not touch them as the legality thing honestly hardly fazes me - most of the source files are transcoded from 384kbit MP3 files, but they have started to offer downloads in lossless now in addition to superior lossy codecs like AAC, MPC, Ogg-vorbis, etc.

one last bit: see this Hydrogenaudio thread or this search result on HA.org using the keyword 'allofmp3'.

__________________
Started talking to yourself I see.
Yes, it's the only way I can be certain of an intelligent conversation.

Black Adder

Nefir

Personally, I like to have the knowledge that the real, tangible CD is sitting there on the shelf, and if anything happpens to my PC, I can always go and rip it again.

I would never use a paid download service... it does not appeal to me, and is more than slightly shady.

Now if they offered full CD images of music CDs that you can burn - and about 700mb would come out to $7 - that would be quite awesome (if not the bandwidth requirements).

__________________
You do not use a Macintosh, instead you use a Tandy
Kompressor break your glowstick, Kompressor eat your candy
Kompressor open jaws, Kompressor release ants
Kompressor watch you scream, Because Kompressor does not dance

CSflim

I don't get it.
Burn a CD of mp3s. At top quality, well encoded mp3s are almost indistinguishable from the originals, so if you want a tangible cd, you can make one!

__________________

Nefir

Isn't it always nicer to own a quality hardcover publication of a book rather than downloading a PDF of it and printing it yourself, or even taking it out of the library?

It doesn't have to make sense - its just the way it is

Speed_Gibson

Transparent* does not equal lossless when dealing with audio files. Any future transcoding to <insert current or future audio codec here> will result in loss of quality. It is true that MPC at q-5 or above and AAC at higher bitrates if transcoded will still sound transparent or close to it, but there is stll the loss unless the source material is lossless or a physical format like a compact disc.

*indistinguishable to your ears from the original wavs on ABX tests.

__________________
Started talking to yourself I see.
Yes, it's the only way I can be certain of an intelligent conversation.

Black Adder