Apparently Gizmodo (as well as a couple other random sites) has posted information about www.allofmp3.com. Great… now the site is COMPLETELY swamped and down. SCREWED!
Anyone who knows me has heard me going on and on about All Of Mp3, they are a russian music site based out of Moscow. They offer incredibly cheap prices on digital music with a very large selection of American mainstream music. What makes them special?
They call this service OnlineEncoding. Pretty nice concept. By allowing you to customize your encoding at purchase time, essentially you decide the sound quality based on your own preference and how much you are willing to pay… but seriously, their prices are so cheap that $$$ really don’t matter.
Also for most of their catalog, bit rates are only available up to 384k. The are most likely re-encoding wav or aiff samples on the fly. It doesn’t producde the best quality later, but for the price… I’m sure for 99% of their customers it’s completely acceptable. What about that last 1%? For them there is OnlineEncodingExclusive. This is an encoding option available for a select few albums allowing you to have the albums encoded directly from a CD-DA quality source. This means that ideally it will come out exactly the same quality as if you bought the CD yourself then encoded it. The price jumps a bit if you select this option… but that’s okay since as I said earlier, price is hardly an option when compared to US CD and digital music prices.
One more downside… The song names and tags aren’t always quite right. Actually, I’d say at least 1 out of 10 songs will be either mispelled or have something else wrong with them causing import into your favorite music mgmt software to need a little guidance and massaging. Once again, for the price, probably worth it.
How is this possible so cheaply? I just don’t know. I’ve heard MANY different explanations ranging from licensing costs to rumors of the Russian Mafia (I doubt the latter). What I do know is that new music cd’s are ALOT cheaper in Russia. I’ve been told a new cd can be purchased for about 125 Rubles in Moscow, which comes out to ~$3 USD. AllOfMp3’s prices are a bit lower than that. I think for their OnlineEncodingExclusive price i’ve seen albums cost about $1.80.
Once again…
Pros:
Cons: