ITunes V's napster v's Musicmatch

[revo]

Well whilst the states starts to have a showdown on the who is going to be the new legal napster, Apple reporting an amazing 25m downloads (not sure if thats all pruchased) in nine months - what does the new face of Music mean for us then?

The format battle continues, but maybe now will become a real issue, as people start to buy on mass, AAC, Mp3, Mp3pro, WMA, Ogg...

and what does it mean to me.. I'm almost at a cross roads with Music and CD's.. and have hundreds, now ripped in a MP3, some 4,000+ tracks later.

and now Coca-Cola are at it... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3409089.stm

Will we really start to see a merging of hardware now (if it hasn't started in a niche way already)?

Questions Questions... thoughts anyone?

C.

[Miyazaki]

I ripped all my cd's to my hard drive and then sold all my cd's. So for me it was a question of needing the £200 odd and the convieniece of the music on my hard drive.

I don't know if it's the next step, as when I have some more money i'll probably buy a dvd-audio player and some discs.

[Whiting]

I'll continue to illegally download music off the P2P network as a way of sampling albums before deciding to purchase or not. If I like something, I have no qualms about forking out the £7.50 to £10 for the CD and will continue to do so. If I don't, it doesn't get listened to and eventually gets deleted to make room for something else. I don't know, I just like to have the CD proper.

And the CDs sound better. MP3's are alright for music-on-the-go etc but they expose their limitations when played through a decent system...I can't afford the space required to rip with out compression.

[Azrikam]

I'm currently boycotting the RIAA and any labels connected to them. Kinda sucks, because my favorite band has a new album out, and I want to support them. I'll probably buy a mess of merchandise from their official site, and download the album for free.

[amordue]

A little off topic but does anyone know if downloading songs from http://www.allofmp3.com is legal? I realise it is legal for the russian site to sell the songs but was wondering if its legal for us in the uk to download them?

The basic premise is you pay some money into an account with them then download music by the MB ($0.01 per MB). You get to choose what encoding options you want mp3 (choice of cbr vbr 128 - 384 kbps blade or LAME encoders), wma, aac, ogg and mpc. Once its encoded they send you and email you download and the amount of MB in cents is taken out of your account.

They pay royalties (according to their legal info) but seems like it must be a fairly small amount considering you can get a whole album at 320kbps for about £1.40

Also no drm on any of the files.

Alex

[revo]

This is new to me.. ! :-)

looking at the legel gubbins it states...

All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3Ì-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.

So that could mean yes.. or it could be bull! anyone committed dollars as yet?

[amordue]

yup, no fraudulent activity on my credit card yet

Just bought an entire album, only takes about 30 seconds to encode, they must have some beefy machines encoding all the requests. THey actually have a link to what they are encoding atm, must be doing business of about 10 songs / second at least

Welll I've got a whole 1GB of transfers to get through (for about £5)...

Alex

[revo]

Let me know what the quality is like! compared to say a ripped CD of equal quality.

I can see the need for more disk space!

C.

[amordue]

Qualtiy is great, compared daft punk - discovery cd (my flatmate owns it) and the 320kbps mp3s I got from allofmp3. The mp3s seem pretty flawless, don't think I could do a better job with EAC and LAME.

Alex

[revo]

Well looks like I'm going to have to take a peek then. I have nearly 50gig of MP3 in mostly LAME VBR@320, and will rapidly run out of disk space given the opportunity here. Thankgoodness for Netjuke and a decent audio browser to find what you want! Thanks for the tip!

and P.S. its is all disk arrary mirrored! Its taken me 5 years to rip all my CD's so that I can pipe on demand around the house.

[revo]

some interesting Answers to the obvious Q's:

Is it legal...?

I am not going to let my credit card number fall into the hands of Russian mafia!

http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3info.htm

Guess quite a few have already asked similar Q's...

[Branxx]

I am using allofmp3 for more than a year and there have never been any problems. I've paid both with my credit card and via Paypal.

The site is legal and well known to RIAA and other similar bodies. If the choice is between downloading from Kazza, paying a $1 per track to iTunes or buying legally from allofmp3 at £0.15 per track with no DRM and high bitrate, I choose allofmp3 any day.

[revo]

Well, I went for it - popped my 15$ into allofmp3 and started downloading those long lost tracks, even those I have on Vinyl but cannot be bothered to rip. It works really well, helped hugely by a 1mb broadband connection mind.

The raises an interesting question into the future of peer 2 peer, which can be annoying and slow sometimes, finding those tracks to replace your vinyl versions has now become easier at low and acceptable cost... just wish the catalogue was bigger!

not sure how long it will last but I'm sticking with it at the moment, and the quality to boot is good too.

I've been using allofmp3 for a while now as well. I've also paid with my CC and via Paypal with no problems.

After the BPI's recent activities against CD-Wow and Play, I'm going to be using it a lot more.

Ratso

[Azrikam]

Wow, this allofmp3.com sounds pretty good.