News AllofMP3.com Impressions: Serious Contender

Gizmodo have given "Legitimate" Russki download site AllofMP3.com a test drive - Here's what they thought:

So I decided to bite the bullet and try out the Russian music download service AllofMP3.com this morning, and so far I'm fairly impressed, but not quite enough to recommend it to everyone...yet.

The signup took forever, not because they wanted a lot of personal information, but simply because the confirmation email took what seemed to be a long time to get to me--around 20 minutes. Eventually, though, I got signed up and selected an album to download, only to be informed I needed to join their 'V.I.P. Service.' At first, I thought this was sort of shady, but in actuality all V.I.P. service entails is 'charging' up your account with some money before they bother doing the live encodes for you. I was a little sketched about giving a borderline-legal Russian music service my credit card, but conveniently they take Paypal, so $10 later I had 1GB of download credit to play with.

More here

 

but i cant speak russian =\

 

I decided to give it a go as they take paypal and right now the min purchase of $10 of download credit (1GB) is about £5.75.
So far I have downloaded 25 songs and with each one the audio quality is fantastic. I only chose 192KBP/s mp3s as they suit me just fine.
The only thing I dislike is the signup email took forever to come through and the english isnt always that good. they have almost every album I want catering for my tastes.
Generally its a pretty cool service though how legit it really is remains to be seen as I found an album by a band that I like that was cancelled apparently and never released but its there and im downloading it right now

still.. for the few pennies I have paid thus far I am impressed.

 

i'm kind of temped to get a fivers worth.looks almost too good to be true

 

Excellent service here - got everything I've wanted

Approximate cost per track is $0.06 (3p per track) for the average 192kbit MP3. I can play them on any machine, transfer to my minidisc - and fast downloads.

edit:

It's quite a clever system they have working. You request tracks the tracks you want and they are then encoded for you on the spot after you've chosen the format and bit rate you want. As you download the files (simple right click and save as) they are then deleted again from their servers.
Only band that I couldn't get so far has been Pitchshifter. Taken a good 750MBs of MP3 so far (seven albums) - equivalent cost of £3.80

edit 2:

http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm

Makes for a interesting read.

 

I just signed up, so far I've downloaded just 2 albums in MPEG-4 format. Very easy to use, and the Explorer program is fantastic. Just buy an album and it appears automatically, downloading one track at a time. I can just walk away and leave it working.

The price is fantastic, especially with it all being in US Dollars.

Don't forget to check out: http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3free.htm. Free stuff is always good.